I. The Rise of the Schooled Society

A quiet revolution has been afoot over the past 150 years that is under-appreciated and often completely overlooked, yet it profoundly influences our lives, shapes who we are, how we think and work, and what we value most.  Formal education – schooling from kindergarten well into adulthood at colleges and universities and other higher education institutions – transforms modern society in ways that were unimaginable at the beginning of the 20^th century.  The idea of a schooled society is precisely this: a society in which not only all children and youth attend long periods of formal schooling and adult status is mostly determined by academic outcomes, but also one where all institutions are increasingly influenced by the ideas, values, and norms originating out of education as a social institution.

In a very short time, human society all over the world went from providing only limited schooling for the masses while saving advanced education opportunities for small numbers of elite students, to schooling all children and youth.  The standard of how much schooling it takes for one to be considered an educated person has steadily risen with every new generation.  This is obvious from our own families’ educational history where completing secondary education for our grandparents was a major personal accomplishment, while most of our generation assumed that college was a very desirable, if not totally necessary, goal, much like many of our children see post-graduate training as a normal and not a particularly unique education aspiration.

At the most basic level it is very apparent that schooling has steadily pushed its way into lives all over the globe. Just fifty years ago one half of all Americans either had no schooling or had attended only primary school, while in just three short generations we have progressed to the point where almost every American adult has at least graduated from high school and over one half of American adults have gone on to colleges and universities. During the same period whole populations in poorer nations went from having no access to any schooling to widespread primary and secondary education.  Currently 80% of all humans aged 15 or over are able to both read and write a short statement about their life (UNESCO, 2003). This fact would have been hard to imagine just fifty years ago, and most likely it would have been plainly unthinkable one hundred years ago.

The triumph of the ideas behind the educational revolution transformed the world in just 100 years from a place where the vast majority of humans received little or no formal education, to one where it is deemed a worldwide crisis if full education for all is not achieved soon (UNESCO, 2003). And in just the last 20 years the public rhetoric shifted from one of education for all as a positive, if distant, potential to one of education for all as an absolutely essential world goal.

Yet, the education revolution is not only about bringing just basic education to all; many nations, wealthy and less so, are in the midst of an unparalleled growth of higher education for all. Following these trends out over the next fifty years, one can easily imagine a world where most people live and work in what can truly be called a schooled society.

The demographical dimensions of the schooled society are well known and have been documented in great detail. In most high-income nations, such as the UK, US, Japan, France, Germany and so forth, mass education has steadily expanded up the life course over the past 100 years. By the turn of the 21^st century the dimensions of education in the world are immense in terms of its recent growth, its claim to people’s time and effort, and its impact on their lives.  What is most salient about the education revolution is both its relative newness to the human society and the speed by which it grown.  As shown in Figure 1, which plots the total worldwide number of students enrolled in primary, secondary, and tertiary (ie higher education) schooling over the past 200 years worldwide, a short time anthropologically-speaking.  And, once started the rate of growth for each level of schooling rapidly becomes significant and sustained. Note also that over the first few decades of the 20^th century growth in primary enrollment takes off and by 1940 bursts into a logarithmic climb, and as primary schooling reaches large numbers of children 20 years later, enrollment in secondary schooling turns sharply up in the 1960s. New advanced sectors of education are spurred on by the growth of the subsequent sector. Demographically, going to school and attending for a considerable number of years is a new and massive change in behavior of children and youth, and supporting this endeavour is a new role for their families and communities.

Figure 1: Number of Students in Elementary, Secondary, and Higher Education        Worldwide  (Source: Schofer and Meyer 2005)

Since the early 1970s the third wave of the education revolution has unfolded as enrollment in higher education has grown substantially. For example, only about 500,000 students were enrolled in higher education institutions worldwide at the beginning of the 20^th century, representing a tiny fraction of 1% of college-age people, but by 2000, the number of tertiary students had grown to approximately one hundred million people, a number that represents about 20% of the relevant age cohort worldwide, and most of this growth occurred after 1960 (UNESCO 2004). In higher-income nations, it is now common for more than half of all youth to receive some post-secondary schooling, with numbers surpassing 80% in a few countries (UNESCO, 2004).  But, the expansion is not limited to the wealthy, industrialized societies; countries like Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar each now possess about as many post-secondary students as could be found in the entire world at the start of the century (Schofer and Meyer, 2005).

Providing widespread educational opportunity for nations’ populations is not only widely thought to be desirable, it is now approaching the status of a basic human right like nutrition, health care, and civil rights.  Following the post-WWII trend of greater involvement of multilateral agency involvement in assisting nations’ economic development, representatives from major agencies such as the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Bank, UNESCO in alliance with governments of most nations, and international non-governmental organizations  (INGOs) such as Oxfam and Action Aid gathered together at an international conference in Jomtien Thailand in 1990.  Not only did they once again declare that education is a basic human right, but they set forth a plan of action to make education universal worldwide – the Jomtien Declaration.  This process was updated and intensified in 2000 at a similar international conference on Education for All in Dakar, Senegal.  In each case the attendees of the conferences affirmed the need to have all children have access to quality education within a relatively short time frame for not only the good of nations, but also for the good of the worldwide society. And ambitious and clear steps to meet these goals are widely dispersed throughout the developing world. But the schooled society is far more than just the mechanical expansion of formal education up the life course for ever greater proportions of humans.  As an institution, formal education has come to be one of only a few dominating modern society, and this social development in the course of human society worldwide holds a number of central implications for the future.

How to Think about the Education Revolution?

In light of this sweeping educational revolution, there is an interesting paradox about schooling in modern society.  On the one hand, we attribute many powers to schools: teaching children to read, to understand mathematics and science, to practice and enjoying the arts, to memorize the historical development of a nation, and now even to know about the development of human society across time and place: these are all routinely thought of as what schools do to transform children into functioning adults.  But on the other hand, schooling is frequently portrayed as failing modern society in fundamental ways, leaving the educational revolution under-appreciated, and the wide dimensions of the schooled society have gone mostly unnoticed.  There is much discussion and hand-wringing over the problems with schools; great things are expected from them, but they seem never fully to deliver.  Here is one example of the dire concerns many have about the quality of modern schools; this one was made by the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, at the National Education Summit on American Secondary Schools held on February 26, 2005:

America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.   By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.  Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.  Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year.

Why this paradox of such high expectations for schooling yet such concerns about its supposed perpetual failure?  First, most people do not recognize the power by which mass schooling transforms society.  Second, many people, even professional educators and scholars of education, become overly fixated on specific parts of what schooling is supposed to do for society at the exclusion of perceiving its formable total impact.  Third, formal education is so ubiquitous in modern life that people rarely appreciate the dynamic way schooling has intensified over recent history and in so doing incorporated itself even deeper into our lives.  Fourth, most people limit their view of schools, colleges, and universities as “helping” institutions that only socialize (some say even oppress) and train our children to join society.

But contrary to these perceptions, in point of fact, schooling from kindergarten through higher education continues to be one of the major success stories of our times; far from a failure, it has transformed who we are, how we think about ourselves, and what we can do.  Interestingly, this fact often goes unappreciated by most in modern society, including professional educators and many social scientists.

But over the past few decades, a group of social scientists-mostly sociologists-have developed a new way to think about the effects of education on modern society that opens up a much wider appreciation of how education transforms everyday lives.  Armed with a new perspective known as neo-institutionalism, these researchers are undertaking exciting new studies outlining the contours of the transforming activity of sending all children to increasingly longer periods of schooling (eg Baker and LeTendra, 2005; Meyer, 1977) The overarching conclusion from these studies presents a vivid picture of how profound the effects of educating all people has been on modern society, and points to the path that the schooled society will likely take in the future.

To appreciate this new perspective, first consider the traditional notion of formal education’s role in society.  On an institutional level formal education is considered to be only a supportive and secondary institution that follows in form and content wherever society takes it.  Probably the most popular image is that of education following (too slowly as Mr. Gates and others would have it) the changing demands of work in particular, and changing societal complexity in general.  Seen this way, schooling is an institution primarily limited to the training of individuals for jobs and the socializing of individuals for a particular society.  The traditional notion is that formal education reproduces society, changing only as society changes at the hands of various external forces.  This image is depicted in the top panel of Figure 2, where schooling only socializes students through teaching curricula and credentials them for adult positions, while the institutional unidirectional influence flows from society to schooling.

Figure 2: Two Models of Education’s Relationship with Society

A neo-institutional analysis turns this traditional notion on its head by arguing that an accounting of the full impact of the education revolution finds that there is much evidence to show that society has come to be more of a reflection of the institution of education rather the other way around. This new image of education and society is one in which formal education is a successful primary institution, so successful in fact, that over the past 50 years it has come to dominate many other institutions such as the family and child rearing, the workplace and ideas of human capabilities, politics and citizenry, and even highly personalized domains like the definitions of success and failure in life (Baker, forthcoming, a).

The lower panel in Figure 2 depicts this perspective with education as a primary institution in the construction of society.  While education continues to educate and credential individuals for roles in society, the institutional influence flows from schooling to society.  Over the course of Western society, in large part because of the rise of the Western university, as education came to play a larger role in creating central ideas and beliefs of modern society, it won significant legitimacy to educate individuals.  In turn, educational achievement became central to individuals’ social status.  This dynamic legitimacy has expanded and intensified over the course of the education revolution to the point where, along with effects on individuals, formal education generates new ideas about people, new privileged human capacities, new ideologies about knowledge and its generation, new social, including occupational, positions, and so forth (Meyer, 1977; Young, 2008).  The educational revolution produces what might be called a “schooled consciousness” promoting a culture of universalistic values, human empowerment, scientific knowledge, and rationality, not only at the individual level, or even at the level of aggregated individuals, but at an institutional level.

This perspective makes the strong case that schooling, as it has been practiced over the past 150 years, is far more than a preparatory exercise for youth, merely following where the technological and social demands of society take it.  Rather, the educational revolution has constructed, for better or worse, most of the dominant ideas, beliefs, and human capabilities that underpin human society as we know it at the beginning of the 21^st century.  This is how best to think about formal education and its possible future impact on society.

It should be cautioned however, that because of the widely Pollyannaish expectations about schooling noted above, discussion about a schooled society is frequently misinterpreted to mean that all things good result from more schooling and its greater role in the definitions of contemporary culture.  On the contrary, there are a number of arguments that start with the assumption that schooling is mostly oppressive (see Young, 2008) for a review and important critique of this line of thinking about schooling). And of course, from schooling used in fascist to apartheid societies over the 20^th century, there are a number of well-known extreme examples of educational oppression.

Interestingly though, most schooling-as-oppressive-always arguments presume a traditional perspective of schooling as described above: to the degree that a society is oppressive so is its schooling as it “prepares” people for the oppressive social order.  In other words, schooling reproduces and even validates existing social inequalities. But the social reproduction argument misses the point that schooling as a social institution constructs society.  Seen this way, schooling, if it were truly as oppressive as some argue, would have to be the root of oppression.  Some have tried to make this case of course (see Bowles and Ginits, 1976, for the US and Willis, 1981 for the UK), but by in large these have failed to account for the actual historical record of schooling and social class in most industrial nations (Baker, 1999).  And as many studies of worldwide, mass schooling and the western style university show, formal education curricula, even in oppressive societies, constructs and spreads an explicit version of human social justice, democratic values, and human universalism that runs counter to most of the extreme forms of social oppression (eg Fiala, 2006).  Hence there are many well-known incidents of suppression of intellectuals and draconian control over schooling to limit its liberating influence in many politically oppressive nations (see for one example from Germany Baker, Kolher and Stock, 2007).

Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that the schooled society powerfully creates social pressure to conform to its logic and punishments for those who do not or cannot conform.  Like all social orders that increasingly come to be dominated by a few key institutions, the schooled society shapes normative restrictions. Anyone who is close to an educationally failed child, or was one himself, knows the pain and frustration of not doing well in school.  In the schooled society, a youth’s image of their future becomes dim when performance in school, for whatever reason, is not successful. And this is far more than just in the technical issue of grades and test-scores: failure in school reflects upon the whole of the individual and remarkably even spills over negatively onto his or her supporting family.  So too as the schooled society intensifies, non-academic types of skills and ideas about human capacities become less privileged and less developed.

The Future of the Schooled Society

There are two scenarios about how the schooled society will proceed that predict diametrically opposed futures.  Mostly along the lines of the traditional image of education and society, the first scenario is by far the most popular one among pundits, casual observers, and often educators alike, but it is far less likely to occur than the second scenario.  Therefore, after a brief description of each, the educational implications of only the more likely second scenario are discussed.

Scenario 1 The Over-education Scenario:

This future scenario predicts that:

The education revolution has now reached its highest point and will wind down over the next three decades into a stasis of relatively little upward expansion of education and a reduction of education’s supremacy over social positioning. Spending upwards of 12-16 plus years in school reaches natural limits of the life course and foregone wages.  Most of the educational expansion of the last forty years is a process of educational inflation, where new degrees are required for the same jobs.  This has resulted in over-educated populations that are economically and socially inefficient and perhaps even dangerous to social cohesion, as individuals who are over-educated will develop unrealistic expectations for jobs and status in adult life that will not materialize.

Also, inflated schooling “dumbs-down” education in order to accommodate the influx of large segments of the population flooding into higher reaches of formal education that are not qualified, not motivated, nor very academically talented.  Other than relatively basic skills of numeracy and literacy, schooling does not add much that is usable, or not otherwise trainable on the job.  Runaway credentialism emerges when an educationally hollow status competition takes over the expansion of formal education.

With just subtle variations, the over-education scenario has been predicted as our imminent educational future virtually ever since the schooled society took off in the 1960s.  Under book titles such as The Diploma Disease, The Great Training Robbery and The Credential Society many predicted that over-education would be a major social problem and educational expansion would evidentially grind to a halt (Dore, 1976, Berg, 1971, 2003; Collins, 1976; also see Bowles and Ginits, 1976.  This was a particularly common forecast in the UK and in nations where a colonial past left a British type of education system (Dore was an influential British observer of education and national development) and in the more aggressively expanding American system (Bowles, Ginits, Berg, and Collins are American scholars) as higher education enrollment rates started to climb – surely the education revolution was going to die at the university’s gate.

The usual policy implications of the over-education scenario is to somehow save education from itself by imposing tighter linkages between formal schooling and jobs, revive vocational education, maintain greater control over testing and admission standards to university, and belief in what was once called “manpower planning” of a centrally guided education and jobs system.

Scenario 2 Continued Educational Expansion and Intensification of the Schooled Society:

This future scenario predicts that:

Early, and persistent, predictions of an approaching over-education future were wrong – in fact, they were spectacularly wrong.  So much so, that growth of the schooled society into the future and its continued construction of much of our culture is very likely.

The evidence that Scenario 2 is more likely to occur in the future than Scenario 1, in that for each predicted part of the over-education scenario much the opposite has occurred.  Briefly, there are five sub-predictions that never materialized, and what did happen in each case is more in line with an expanded and intensified schooled society.  The evidence below is mostly from the US, but it should be noted too that for a number of historical reasons, the political economy of American schooling has tended to herald each new wave of the education revolution and its ensuing spread worldwide, often even changing long standing educational traditions in the UK and other nations of Western Europe (Baker and LeTendre, 2005).

Failed Prediction 1: Natural limitations on the amount of the life course people will spend in formal education will eventually retard educational expansion as the main engine of the schooled society.

People continue to seem quite willing to gain ever-greater amounts of education, even foregoing wages.  Life course limits are pushed aside by the spread of the logic of “life-long education.”  What were once advanced degrees for a very small population are increasingly expanding to meet demand by larger segments of populations propelled by mass education at lower levels. For example, as shown in Figure 3, both enrollment in all graduate programmes and completion of master degrees (ie post the usual 4-year baccalaureate) have increased by substantial amounts since the 1970 in the US.  Furthermore, from just 1970 to 2004 the growth rates among Americans completing a masters and Ph.D. degree is 140% and 50% respectively. And similarly, professional degrees, such as law, medicine, dentistry, have increased by over 100% over the same period. And while this trend is occurring in the U.S., it will most likely rapidly spread through many national systems of higher education.

Figure 3. Growth Trends in University-Graduate Study in the U.S. 1970-2004

Failed Prediction 2: Educational expansion will have to be limited in the future as more people reach advanced degrees and the end of the structure of formal schooling as we know it.

There are recent new patterns of educational expansion occurring in the US as more people seek multiple university degrees. For example, the US Department of Education followed a nationally representative sample of 1992-93 B.A. completers over the following ten years.  Four out of ten enrolled in some graduate study during the decade, and one fourth of those enrolled in multiple graduate degrees of which half were for two or more masters in different disciplines (US Department of Education, 2005). Among B.A. degree-holders from private research universities, where most of the spectacular success of American research universities has been (see below), over one half of B.A. completers enrolled in graduate programmes and over a fourth of these enrolled in more than one degree programme at some time during the ten year span.  Similarly, large numbers of B.A. holders envision themselves as completing a graduate degree or even two sometime in their future; and, the US study reports that at the time of the B.A. completion a full 85% expected to undertake graduate training over the ensuing decade.  Of course this did not happen (yet) for about one-half of these individuals, but the implications are clear-graduate training at university is becoming more normative with each decade, and the growth of graduate degrees and multiple graduate degrees is an outgrowth of this.  And of course there has been a worldwide expansion of adult access to additional formal education and this will likely continue into the future.

Failed Prediction 3: There will not be much job up-grading as more of the labor force enters with more education, thus leading to an educationally hollow and unsustainable credentialism.

There is an emerging research literature indicating that the schooled society has had a profound impact on many dimensions of the workplace and job content technology, including how it is incorporated into work. Largely on the pages of the Quarterly Journal of Economics over the past decade and one half, economists of labor and national development have developed an insightful set of empirical findings about the relationship among education of workers, technology, and the organization of the work inside firms.  Over and over these studies report that education influences the world of work more than the other way around.  What once was the standard assumption that as each generation attains more formal education there is little true job upgrading has been buried by these recent studies.

Failed Prediction 4: Over-education leads to future social unrest and great dissatisfaction with schooling in general.

There is no evidence that this most dramatic of predictions of the over-education scenario ever happened in any part of the world as mass schooling and higher education rolls on.  And there is some systematic analysis that verifies this. A representative example is the comprehensive study by Val Burris who finds in a 1983 analysis of a large nationally-representative sample of working Americans no substantial differences between people who are over-educated for their jobs and those who are not across their stated job satisfaction, political radicalism, political alienation, unionism, and allegiance to an achievement ideology.

Failed Prediction 5: Educational Expansion “dumbs-down” education, making it less relevant to changing human capacities in the future.

This is a common prediction that is hard to test, but there is emerging evidence to suggest if anything, mass education has made schooling far more demanding on a cognitive level than was the case at the beginning of the last century. For details see Consequence II below.

II. Two Consequences of the Schooled Society for the Future of Knowledge, Creativity and Communication

If scenario 2 is the more likely to occur in the future, what are some of the main educational consequences and policy implications?  Two are described here, one for higher education, and the other for all levels of education starting from the very beginning of schooling.

A.  The Future of Knowledge Production: The Super Research University’s Knowledge Conglomerate

The advent of the super research university (hereafter, super RU) and its knowledge production conglomerate, primarily in the US, over the past several decades is a stunning development of the schooled society with major implication for the future of society (Mohrman, Ma and Baker, 2007).  An intensification of a number of unique qualities of the Western university has resulted in a small, but growing, number of institutions with the capacity to produce unprecedented levels of science, technology, and knowledge about human society.  Sometimes identified as “world-class research universities,” these institutions are, for better or worse, leading the establishment of an emerging model of the university that is rapidly becoming the accepted standard by which institutions will undertake graduate training and research. For better or worse, the ideas driving the super RU are rapidly forming into a pervasive normative model for the university throughout higher education worldwide with major implications for knowledge, science and technology production into the future.

So too, the rising super RU model, emulated by so many universities supported by the schooled society, has set the foundation for the much discussed knowledge society, and its variations such as Richard Florida’s creative class and Robert Reich’s symbolic analysts.  In a dynamic interplay between knowledge production and the expansion of knowledge domains, the university has played a key role.  It is the main arbitrator of knowledge, not just in the form of science and technology, but also in terms of business, social science, and traditional humanities (Frank and Gabler, 2006).  The knowledge conglomerate has also worked to expand the range of occupations assumed to require a university degree. This is counter to the much touted claim in the early1990s that universities’ knowledge production system, Mode 1 science as it was known (eg Gibbons et al, 1994), would become outdated and give way to a mostly a non-university based new system, called Mode 2 knowledge production.  But the original prediction about the decline of knowledge production at universities did not happen; while non-universities organizations got into the knowledge production process, the super RU has actually increased the university’s share of an expanding knowledge production conglomerate (Geiger, 2004).

For example, here is how some leading neo-institutional analysts of the university and its role in the schooled society describe this institution power of the university:

The university – while inefficient at preparing people for specialized roles, in comparison to direct role-training arrangements – is extremely well positioned to support precisely such generalized notions.  Students learn – and society itself learns – that all the specialized and professionalized roles of contemporary society are fundamentally based on universal scientific knowledge and rationality, and that with schooling, ordinary persons can be transformed to possess the relevant competencies (Meyer et al, 2007, p203)

Briefly listed, the growing literature on these super RUs identifies a set of defining characteristics that most observers agree upon (eg Geiger, 1993; Mohrman, Ma and Baker, 2007; Baker, forthcoming, b) including: Research Intensive; Transcending global mission; New Knowledge for the Good Society; Decline of the Traditional and the Rise of the new Professoriate; Recruitment of Academic Core in National and International Markets; Greater Internal Complexity; Denser Networks of Universities and Steeper Competition Worldwide; Extreme Costs and Mixture of Funding.

By and large, the rise of the super RU stems from the American higher education experience with mass education and a norm of universal access. The muscular approach to knowledge generation stems from a broad consensus in the US (and everywhere else too) around the idea that university research is crucial to economic global competitiveness (Geiger and Sa, 2008).  Over the past several decades, three major transforming trends in higher education are unfolding that are widely discussed, yet only rarely in relationship to one another.  In fact, for many higher education observers, these three trends represent opposites within formal education, that on the surface seem to create more conflict than harmony within the university. One trend, often divisively debated, is the rapid growth of the private sector of higher education across most nations.  The second trend, often considered pedestrian, is the unprecedented expansion and massification of higher education in not only wealthy nations such as the United States and those in Western Europe, but in almost all nations as well.  The final trend, often celebrated, is the rise and flourishing of super RUs; mostly in the US, but increasingly now as a model aspired to by many research universities throughout the world.  What is not often appreciated about these three trends is that at their root they are related, even symbiotic, to the point that each likely would not be happening if it were not for the other.

An appreciation of the underlying relationship among these three seemingly separate major transforming forces in higher education develops a fuller picture of the institutional dynamism behind the growing legitimation of the university and its role in shaping the schooled society now and into the future.  Frequently these three trends are assumed to be in some kind of zero-sum competition with each other, but this underestimates the institutional power of the educational revolution and the role of the university in its development.  Also such an underestimate can lead to a policy environment in which universities and ministries of education around the world actually inhibit the development of mass higher education, private institutions, and efforts to reach for the full capacity of research universities to generate new knowledge and train the next generation of scientists and scholars.

These three trends are bound together in the case of American experience with higher education.  This has always been so, but recently the dynamism among these trends has intensified to an unprecedented level with clear implications for the future.  Often this intensification of private funds within American RUs is seen as a decline in the strength of universities as an institution, but in fact the very opposite case – that private funds reflect the growing overall strength of the university – can be made.

Focusing on the American case to predict the future of knowledge production in universities worldwide is not meant to imply that all nations must follow this pattern, nor is it intended to be a statement about political or cultural hegemony.   Rather, it is justified by the fact that, for better or worse, the US has been the world leader in the institutional changes represented by mass education and the coming of the schooled society.  This is also not to say that how the American school system is operationalized in practice is necessarily the world leader (on a number of criteria, it is not), rather what comparative research on education change clearly shows is that over the past few decades there is increasing worldwide isomorphism among national school and higher education systems, and many of the ideas, goals, values and beliefs behind this process originally stem from the American experience with formal education, particularly since the 1960s (eg Baker and LeTendre, 2005).

How then to think about these three phenomena together?

Geiger traces the dimensions of science and technology development in US universities over the past half century and his cogent analysis of basic research production shows precisely the enhancing of the societal mission of the university (Geiger, 1993, 2004).  Historically the rise of the “knowledge production conglomerate” in American research universities consists of a robust funding situation plus existing trends in the organization of university research and scholarship aimed at interdisciplinarity, the proliferation of research institutes, and ‘raising the bar’ in faculty hiring that are at the heart of the super RU model.  This aggressive approach to knowledge generation that ensues from this feeds into the idea that university-based, or university-influenced, research is crucial to economic global competitiveness.  It is a short jump from this image of the role of the university to society-wide consensus that the university is a leading institution for the good of society.  This very image of the American university, as it transforms itself into a super RU, is widely evident in the American culture.

This is often missed as many observers of RUs assume that privatization and public funds are in a zero-sum relationship.  And indeed a superficial reading of trends can lead one to this conclusion.  It is true that the American federal government’s share in funding research (once the source of most university-based research) declined dramatically over the last twenty years from almost one half to just over a fourth of the nation’s total expenditures on R&D.  And what gained proportionally during the same time were privatized sources, which now fund 70% of all American R&D.  Furthermore, the funding for basic research, which is predominately carried out in universities, grew only from about 14 to 18%.

What goes unappreciated though is that both public and private funds have flowed into American universities as a consequence of this broad societal consensus around mass higher education, and therefore university-based research has increased proportionally (Geiger, 2004). Overall growth of all American R&D from 1980 to 2000 kept pace with the rapid growth of science and technology that the world has seen since the 17^th century.  Combined university-based and non-university-based R&D (basic research and expensive technology development) spending from 1980 to 2000 more than doubled in constant dollars from about $115 to $248 billion.  And importantly, within this rapidly expanding R&D climate, the university has held its share at about one-half of all basic research.  While federal (ie public) support to American universities has declined, it has been replaced from private economic sources, so that overall academic funding as a share of GDP grew by 50% in just twenty years, to an amazing $28.2 billion in 2000.

Also, the rise of the model of the super RU (private and public) and expanding access to higher education are both large-scale trends that reflect underlying models of education and its role in society that in turn are transforming higher education.  To see this argument, it is useful to consider the context from which the super RU model originated.  As pointed out, the US has the highest number of universities with the characteristics described above.  These are universities that produce considerable amounts of new knowledge across many fields (eg out of the top 10 universities worldwide with the highest citation rates per faculty size rates, 8 are US institutions, and of those 5 are private).  And many other American universities are above the world average in citations.  Similarly, out of those universities worldwide that can generate the enormous level of research funding, by far most are American, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1:  Top Ten Universities in Citations/Faculty Size

Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement, October 6, 2006

But the usual take on the American case – private money, low central control, and high tolerance for between-institution inequality (in part a function of inequalities produced by mixing private and public funding sources) – is not the root cause of why so much of the super RU model stems from the American experience.  In other words, the super RU is not just the product of the historically unique private section of American higher education.  It is not just that the super RU model is an expensive one to pursue, requiring a wealthy society.  Nor that private money is now a substantial source of funding in the U.S.  Nor even that many super RUs are privately controlled.  While these factors certainly have enhanced the development of the super RU model, they are not at its root cause.  Instead, the cause is found in the way in which American society has generated widespread societal support for higher education, institutionally led by the research university, which includes private universities and private support for significant parts of public universities. In other words, formal education in the US has been an early leader in the movement towards universal access to higher education and all that such an idea includes (Trow, 2005).  Instead of assuming that mass access to higher education, the super RU model, and the role of private funds are mutually exclusive, zero-sum forces, what the American case illustrates is that in reality these three trends have significantly supported one another in the past and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

It is true that this fundamental symbiotic relationship is not the product of some central plan, instead it grew out of a unique set of historical conditions.  The effects of which have become more obvious as the model for the American super RU becomes attractive to many other nations leading higher education there to mimic certain aspects – including faculty working conditions, competitive-based governmental support for research, a large private sector basis – as well as the idea of substantial private funds within the system.  But what is frequently overlooked in these efforts is the exceptional societal support the US has been able to generate for education in general and higher education in specific-both public and private.

American society has achieved this for essentially two reasons: first, through a widely comprehensive system of public (and to a lesser degree private) secondary education graduating youth with the aspirations and expectations for more education, and second through a relatively open and comprehensive higher education system made up of both public and private universities and many small private colleges.  This has lead to the belief in American society that the university, and particularly the super research university, is not an elitist or esoteric enterprise; instead, it is perceived to a remarkable degree as a democratic and useful institution.  The fact that so many Americans attend some institution of higher education and have deep connections to these institutions in all of their many types, translates into wide societal support (ie public and private monies) for the costs of super research universities, even if only a small proportion of Americans will attend, or has attended, one of these highly selective institutions.  As with the expansion of mass and comprehensive (ie non-stratified) elementary and secondary education, the US has over the last century led the way in mass higher education with the idea that more and more types of people can develop as individuals (and not just as workers) through extended formal education (about 60 to 70% of American youth with a secondary school degree enroll in some type of higher education).  At the same time, what the research university is thought to do for American society further legitimates the expansion of education for all. Also, private universities and private aspects of public universities have played a direct role in mass education.

The tremendous level of private support for higher education in the US is not only a reflection of rising tuition, it is also a reflection of the way that higher education in general, and universities in particular, are thought about in the US. The lack of a state controlled exclusive set of universities and other institutions of higher education in the US has led to robust and broad private support of individual institutions, and also of the entire sector to a degree.  Certainly rising tuitions and private shares of funding is a trend to be concerned about and in some ways is a product of falling public funds for higher education.  But the idea of societal support is broader than just the shifting split between public and private funds.  In the US overall, the pie continues to grow for higher education.

The 19^th century American land-grant model of the research university laid the groundwork for the future of American higher education, and in many ways perhaps also the future of higher education globally. Here are all of the forerunners to the new ideas that now drive the super research university in terms of the symbiotic relationship between university and society, and joining together several strands of ideas into one institution for the first time.  Scientific knowledge, rational social progress, human empowerment, and universalistic values become embedded within the authority of the university, and this authority, based on an intensification of these ideas in the postmodern world, drives the current support of the super RU model in the U.S. (see also Meyer et al, 2007).  Also, every land-grant university, even though they are public, incorporates significant private funds, from tuition to research collaborations with private ventures, to huge alumni giving of private gifts (money), to lucrative deals trading universities’ logo for revenue from private sports apparel firms.  This is not to pass moral judgment on the American super RU and its privatization; there are clearly positive and negative implications of the model, and thoughtful critics on both sides.  Rather, the point of the American case is that one way to think about the growing private higher education sector worldwide is that it is partially driven by the rise of societal support for the super RU from mass education and now mass higher education.  And that in turn, once private support for higher education begins to flow and becomes normative, it feeds into the overall growing institutional power of higher education.

The main policy implication for the future of the UK system is not necessarily to copy the details of the American system – in fact, attempts to do so in other nations have not worked very well.  Instead the message to take away from here is to focus on factors that increase overall societal support for the knowledge production function of universities.  And given the logic of the schooled society, the best way to do so is educationally, not through public relations campaigns and other trivial methods.  In other words, opening up access to higher education and lowering early barriers to secondary education leading to higher education generates societal support.  If universities remain mostly elitist, this will limit their ability to generate the considerable financial resources needed to compete as super RUs, or world-class knowledge producers in the future.  The old model that elite institutions will train the elite knowledge producers and this can be sustained by special public funding is rapidly breaking down.

B. The Future of Knowledge Acquisition: The Rise of Academic Intelligence and the Cognitive Revolution

Formal education is the only institution in modern society that on a consistent basis has the legitimate power to organize all accepted types of knowledge into acceptable format and determine valid truth claims, and specify who and when people have access to learn these new fields (Young 2008). And if this power were not enough, for the first time in human history formal education defines and almost single-handedly focuses society on one particular capability that all normally developing humans must have.

Mass schooling has produced and widely distributed a uniquely new definition of intelligence, and in a relatively short time made it universally accepted as not only useful, but essential to being a fully developed individual ready to participate in modern society.  As never before, schooling through its everyday activities has created a new model completely based on cognitive skills about what is important for effective human development and performance. What might be best described as “academic intelligence” is perhaps, among all of the significant impact of the schooled society, the cardinal institutional product of mass education. Academic intelligence can be defined as: those cognitive skills needed to do abstract reasoning, problem-solving, higher order thinking, multiple perspective taking, and effortful thinking.

All forms of formal education increasingly narrow human capabilities towards cognitive performance.  With the development and flourishing of academic intelligence, such skills as mental problem-solving, effortful reasoning, abstraction and higher-order thinking, and the active use of intelligence take center stage while pushing off more traditional academic skills such as recitation, disputation, memorization, formalistic debate, formulae application, accuracy, and authoritative text reading and exegesis.  Cognitivism has become the overarching epistemological theme of modern education, and as the schooled society deepens there is evidence that cognitivism continues to intensify in its importance.

Exactly when academic intelligence emerged as the main objective of mass schooling is hard to pinpoint, but there is good evidence that it has intensified over the last half century, and in so doing it pushed aside other older objectives of formal education.  Academic intelligence retains some vestiges of both old classical education and the spirit of vocational training, but it emerges out of a type of dialectic process between these former goals of education, and as such is a synthesis that is quite different from a simple compromise or watering-down of the two.  Academic intelligence is what children throughout the world must learn to be a “fully-developed human.” Note the change in terminology of the objective of schooling from the older phrase “well-educated” with its implications of mastery of content versus the ontological implications of the contemporary phrase “fully-developed.”  In so doing on a mass basis, the educational revolution has made much of the traditional epistemological foundation of schooling – classical intellectualism and vocationalism – obsolete.

A good example of the trend towards academic intelligence in not only what is presented in schooling, but also what becomes defined as the way to generate new knowledge in society is the one hundred year evolution of mathematics curricula.  A recent study (Baker et al, forthcoming, c), undertook a cognitive assessment of primary school mathematics textbooks (as a proxy of the curricula in the localized US system) over the 20^th century.  Two of the major trends found illustrate the point here.  First, contrary to the notion that mass education “dumbs down” curricula, the mathematics in textbooks has, particularly since the 1960s, included more advanced material at earlier grades.  And two, most germane to the argument here, the textbook material from the 1960s onward increased all types of problems that require the kinds of skills that make up academic intelligence.  As the cognitive demand of the curricula increases, all students are required to try to think mathematically and reason about the subject in ways that students early in the century were never asked to.  The model of young student learning mathematics in the 1940s and 1950s was that of the careful, accurate and tireless calculator, and by the late 1960s on the model was as a “little” mathematician.

A second illustration of the consequence of increased focus on academic intelligence in the schooled society is the case of increasing IQ across generations of adults. Populations of humans living in what are now the wealthier of nations have gotten considerably “smarter” over the course of the 20^th century and continue to do so (Flynn, 1987).  This once little-known phenomenon, called the Flynn Effect, is appreciated by aficionados of the study of intelligence, although pop-sociology has recently spread this fact to a wider audience.  When psychometricians compare performance on tests of IQ (intelligence quotient) over the last century they find that the average person in a generation scores higher than the average person in the preceding generation.  In fact, the whole distribution of scores has shifted upwards over the past 80 years with each succeeding generation.

As shown on the Figure 4, when raw scores are compared over history a growing average IQ trend is evident to an amazing degree; compared to the average person in 1900, the average person now scores two full standard deviations above this at 130.  Successive generations have been gaining about 15 IQ points over the preceding generation; while 15 IQ points may not seem like a lot, it represents going from mere average intelligence to superior intelligence, and of course people with superior intelligence (120 plus) in the preceding generation are matched by people in the succeeding generation with exceptional scores (135 plus).

Figure 4. Rise in IQ, Wechsler Tests and Stanford-Binet,  1932-1992

There are two other qualities of the trend of growing IQ, both of which may be a function of the educational revolution.  First, all the evidence uncovered so far indicates that the Flynn Effect has occurred only in nations that have been economically developed and had early and sustained mass education for some time, such as Japan, Western European countries, and the US and Canada (Flynn, 1987).  And second, the part of IQ that has had the most dramatic historical increases is what is informally called “fluid IQ.”

When psychometricians think about intelligence, they often clump IQ abilities into two large sets of capabilities.  One set, known as fluid IQ, is made up of our ability to solve novel problems through planning approaches to complex tasks (executive functioning), keep important facts in mind as we solve problems (working memory), process information in an effective way (inhibitory control), shift our mind’s attention to parts of problems in an effective manner (attention shifting), and understand spatial relationships.  For example, if you were shown a set of complex abstract figures that you had never seen before and told that they are part of a pattern varying in shadings, geometric shapes, and size, like Figure 5, and you were asked to describe what the next abstract figure in the pattern would be, solving this problem would engage your fluid intelligence skills.  In fact, these kinds of pattern recognition problems are used to measure people’s performance on tests of fluid IQ, the most commonly used being the Ravens Progressive Matrices Test.  A real life application of fluid IQ would be the cognitive skills you would use if you planned an approach to solving a new and complex set of problems at the workplace.  Many of the skills of academic intelligence regularly use fluid IQ capabilities.

Figure 5. Problems illustrating the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test

The other set of cognitive functions, known as crystallized IQ, is made up of our abilities to remember and understand facts and routine solutions to problems that we have accrued over our lives. If you were asked, for example, to name the first four Prime Ministers of the 20^th century, or how to calculate a sphere’s circumference, solving these problems would use your crystallized skills (including realizing that you once knew the answers to these but now can’t recall, although you do know where you can refresh your memory). While Flynn and others find some evidence of persistent, moderate rise in crystallized IQ across generations, it has been people’s fluid IQ skills that have climbed through the roof over the past 100 years.

But what should we make of this?  Is it really true that there are now many geniuses among us, or that in our grandparents’ day most people didn’t have the intelligence required to understand the rules of American baseball or British cricket?  Obviously not. And at the same time, 80 some years is a short time in the whole of human phylogenetic development (ie as a species) over roughly 200,000 years, much too short for any kind of massive genetic selection resulting in superior human intelligence throughout the population.  Instead all indications point to some impact of the immediate environment over the past century that has motivated and trained people’s capacity for fluid, and to a lesser extent, crystallized cognitive skills.

Results of a recent set of studies indicate that mass schooling is a major cause of this growing IQ among successive generations.  These studies were based on methods and ideas from an unusual combination of social and neuro-sciences that brought the neo-institutional analysis of schooling with exciting new findings and ideas about how the human brain develops and is transformed through everyday experiences in school (eg Eslinger et al, 2008).

The idea that formal education, spreading to ever wider proportions of the populations for increasingly longer times and with ever greater demands on people’s attention, is a likely cause of rising IQ is a dramatic demonstration of the constructivist nature of schooling.  Academic intelligence has become the central highly valued human skill of the schooled society, a skill that just century ago would have been considered overly narrow and of dubious benefit to the functioning person. Over time, formal education has made this type of cognitive performance a much valued and necessary skill that all students are expected to master. Not the learning of facts, nor the rote application of methods to problems, modern mass schooling from Kindergarten to increasingly at the highest reaches of college and university has promoted the cognitive skills of academic intelligence as the primary learning goal of an education.

C. Implications for the Future: BCH Questions

The assumption behind the thoughts on each of these issues is that the second scenario above, the continued intensification of the schooled society, is the one likely to happen, and so it is the only one considered here.

1. Educational goals: In these different scenarios how will the ‘goals’ of education change? What demands for qualification, socialisation and subjectification will there be as a result of these trends and in these different futures? What implications would there be for assessment practices?

The far more likely scenario of the continued intensification of the schooled society will not significantly shift educational goals from what they are now, but predicted here is an intensification and continued narrowing of goals.  The goals of academic education for all students, the rise of education as human capital through human development will continue to grow and replace older notions of vocationalism and classicism, as well as the imagery of man-power planning (Baker and Lenahrdt, 2008).  Because of the early development of British education over the 19^th century, ideas of elite and vocational education are embedded and could prove resistant to change.  So, too, academic intelligence will continue to shape both the curricular objective as well as institutions such as the workplace and the labor market.

Also it is unlikely that the model of knowledge production through the super RU will decline in the foreseeable future; Mode 1 continues to be quite healthy.  The super RU, and its components, appears not to be a fad.  The model of the super RU has spread across many nations as at least an aspiration, if not a full-blown plan.  If British educators and higher education officials incorporate this model in future plans for higher education, this will greatly enhance the nation’s educational and knowledge production competitiveness into the future.

2. Educational ‘personnel’: Who will be teaching/learning/mentoring/caring in the light of these trends and in these different futures?  How will risk to each of these different groups be exacerbated or reduced in different futures?

Teachers will be asked to be ever more academic in their approach, yet to a much wider variety of students from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of strengths and weaknesses.  This paradox creates much of the stress in teaching.  If it is made explicit to all involved some of the stress can be overcome.  Obviously as the demands of academic intelligence and schooling in general rise and more of the populations of children and youth are asked to succeed at these for longer periods of their lives, more are at risk of needing more intensive remedial education.  The increase and penetration in to all facets of schooling of the American special education for academic at-risk students is a consequence of this.

The universities too will experience the same.  As described in section II A above, the support for the massive resources needed for state-of-the-art knowledge production will increasingly depend on wider societal support of higher education in general.  This means that teaching in the university will need to change in the direction of student-centered, with abundant remedial opportunities.

3. Educational institutions: Given these trends and potential scenarios, how might education be organised and governed? What accountability measures could be considered? What organisational and institutional structures become possible?

In many ways this is obvious from the description of the schooled society above.  One clear institutional implication of the knowledge production conglomerate and the super RU is that widespread Mode 2 knowledge production has not happened, or at least it has not reduced the role of the university as was originally predicted.  The need for wide societal support of knowledge production melds together more access to the university and science and scholarship.   The logic of the old organizational arrangement of breaking off research into non-university organizations that was so popular in Western Europe is not likely to be the best way to do this; in fact these arrangements as supported by elite scientists and scholars of these institutions, are likely to retard societal support in that they detract from the symbiotic process of mass education as the platform upon which a knowledge society is sustained.

So, too, accountability, at both the schooling level and in higher education (within the next few years there will be a PISA-type comparison of higher education students cross-nationally), will need to focus more on the ability of schools and universities to provide academic type training to all children and youth.  In other words, the standard of successful education narrow and intensify around academics too.  Different objectives for different people will continue to die out as a value, and will be replaced with the notion of the use of academically-based education as the only way to assist in the general human development of all the nation’s children and youth.

4. Educational methods: Given these trends, how might learning best be supported? How might teaching best be enabled? How might we best assess the outcomes of these methods?  What evidence do we have now that could be mobilised to respond to these trends?

Most germane here is the implication of rising and intensifying academic intelligence as the main object of schooling from the earliest years on. This trend will in the future put even greater pressure on educators to devise methods to assist all learners to master these cognitive skills.  The intensive narrowing focus on these skills will make a major social problem out of those who cannot master these skills.  This will be a formable challenge for formal education into the future.

5. Educational tools: In these different scenarios, what artefacts (material, conceptual, knowledge-based, technical) will we be able to employ in support of education and assessment? What interventions and practices that we see in education now could give us insight into how we might use these artefacts in future?

It is a reasonable prediction to make that the continued cognitive-ization of educational materials will occur well into the future.  The same is true of new knowledge in general.  Educators, teachers and professors alike, will need to be trained in these ideas.  Right now in the US, for example, most teachers and professor (other than psychology professors) have a rather crude introduction to the ideas and findings of the cognitive revolution in the study of the human brain and mind and its capabilities.  This is a limitation that needs to be addressed.

6. Educational outcomes: In these different scenarios who will benefit? Who will be at risk? What interventions could be designed to enable equity of outcome?

Thoughts on this are covered in sections 2 and 4 above.

7. Beliefs about education: In these different scenarios, what views might the wider public have about the goals and aspirations of education? What different approaches to education might they more readily accept or reject? This area has been added after discussion with the EAG, and will be considered not only through the Challenges but also through the Public and Stakeholder engagement programme.

Thoughts on this have been covered in I and II A above.

References

Baker, D. (forthcoming a) The Schooled Society: How The Quiet Educational Revolution Transforms Society.

Baker, D. (forthcoming b) Privatization, Mass Higher Education, and the Super Research University: Symbiotic or Zero-sum Trends? Die Hochschule (German Journal on Higher Education).

Baker, D., Knipe, H., Cummings, E., Collins, J., Gamson, D., Blair, C., and Leon, J. (forthcoming c) One Hundred Years of American Primary School Mathematics: A Content Analysis and Cognitive Assessment of Textbooks from 1900 to 2000.

Baker, D. (1999) Schooling All the Masses: Reconsidering the Origins of American Schooling in the Postbellum Era. Sociology of Education, 72 (4), pp.197-215.

Baker, D. and LeTendre, G., (2005) National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling. Stanford, CA., Stanford University Press.

Baker, D., Stock, M. and Koehler, H. (2007) Socialist ideology and the contraction of higher education: Institutional consequences of state manpower and education planning in the former East Germany, 1949 to 1989. Comparative Education Review, 51 (3), pp.353-377.

Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America. New York, Basic Books.

Berg, I. (1971, 2003) Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. New York, Praeger Press.

Burris, V. (1983) The Social and Political Consequences of Overeducation. American Sociological Review, 48 (4), pp.454-467.

Collins, R. (1979) The Credential Society. New York, Academic Press.

Dore, R. (1976) The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification, and Development. London, Institute of Education.

Eslinger, P., Blair, C., Wang, J., Lipovsky, B., Realmuto, J., Baker, D., Thorne, S., Gamson, D., Zimmerman, E., Rohrer, L. and Yang, Q. (2008) Developmental Shifts in fMRI Activations During Visuospatial Relational Reasoning. Brain and Cognition.

Fiala, R. (2006) Educational Ideology and the School Curriculum. In: Benavot, A. and Braslavsky, C. (eds). School Knowledge in Comparative and Historical Perspective, pp.15-35. Comparative Education Research Center, University of Hong Kong. Hong Kong, Springer Books.

Flynn, J.R. (1987) Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101, pp.171-191.

Frank, D. and Gabler, J. (2006) Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century. Stanford CA., Stanford University Press.

Geiger, R. (1993) Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research University since World War II. New York, Oxford University Press.

Geiger, R. (2004a) Knowledge and money: Research universities and the paradox of the marketplace. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Geiger, R. and Sa, C. (2008) Tapping the Riches of Science: Universities and the Promise of Economic Growth. Cambridge, Harvard University Press

Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London, Sage Publication.

Meyer, J. (1977) The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83 (1), pp.55-77.

Meyer, J., Ramirez, F., Frank, D. and Schofer, E. (2007) Higher Education as an Institution. In: Gumport, P. (ed) Sociology of Higher Education: Contributions and their Contexts. Baltimore, MD., Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mohrman, K., Ma, W. and Baker, D. (2007) The Emerging Global Model of the Research University. In: Altbach, P. and Peterson, P. (eds.) Higher Education in the New Century: Global Challenges and Innovative Ideas. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers, and co-published by UNESCO Paris France.

Schofer, E. and Meyer, J. (2006) The World-Wide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. American Sociological Review, 70 (6), pp.898-920.

Trow, M. (2005) Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and Phases of Higher Education in Modern Societies since WWII. International Handbook of Higher Education. Edited by Philip Altbach, Kluwer, 2005

UNESCO (2003-2004) UNESCO – EFA Global Monitoring Report. Available from http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=23023&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (2005) Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study 1993/2003. Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office.

Young, M. (2008) Bringing Knowledge Back in: From Social Constructivism to social realism in the Sociology of Education. London, Routledge.

Willis, P. (1981) Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Contributors, New York, Columbia University Press.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Most people who are still illiterate are living in very poor nations and seven out of ten are women (UNESCO, 2003).

We shall consider providers of educational media, teaching, courses, institutions, territories, assessment and accreditation.

Schools

The UK’s three online schools opened in 2005 and collectively have approximately 200 full time students. The schools group learners into classes of up to 15 and use visual presentation tools alongside ‘Synchronous computer-mediated communication’ (SCMC), that is, voice and text based communication that works at the group and 1:1 levels. All schools report a steady increase in demand. Online schools are now also seen in, for example, the US and Canada.

Home schooling is increasing in the UK and the US. In the UK, an estimated 16,000 children are now educated at home, a three-fold increase since 1999; various studies suggest that home schooling is growing at 10-18% per year. In the US, growth is estimated to be 400% in ten years. Increased availability of digital learning resources and dissatisfaction with mainstream education provision are plausible drivers of this growth.

A further relevant trend is the rise of schools governed totally or partially by non Local Authority actors including parent groups, companies, Universities, and third sector organisations such as the RSA.

Universities

‘Corporate Universities’ are a growing phenomenon in the US. In practice they range from training departments to degree-granting branches of major companies, and in 2001 they were estimated to number 2000 in the US, up from 400 in 2003. Among the most famous are those of Boeing, Motorola and Walt Disney; Apple University is due to launch in California in 2009. Corporate Universities tend to be well-resourced, media-rich environments and as such could be potentially interesting sites of emerging next practice.

Corporate accreditation has arrived in the UK, with McDonalds, Network Rail and Flybe being the first companies to be given accreditation powers by the QCA. This could be said to reflect a growing disconnect between what is learnt in formal education and the skills required by major companies.

While Universities and Higher Education institutions have long been making use of ICT to offer distance learning opportunities, entirely virtual Universities are a new phenomenon. Among them are the US Army’s Virtual University (eARMYU), Duke Fuqua School of Business, Canadian Virtual University, Virtual University of Pakistan, Jones International University, the Open University of Catalonia, and the Virtual University of Applied Sciences in Germany.

Some campus-based universities are now offering ‘traditional’ courses alongside ‘reduced seat-time’ courses and fully online courses, reducing institutions’ bricks and mortar needs per student and thereby potentially expanding capacity (Bonk, 2005).

Professional training organisations are also employing a greater blend of face-to-face and distance learning. For example, “military training for captains in the National Guard now employ blended learning with combinations of asynchronous exercises for perhaps a year, synchronous tactical manoeuvre training for another 4-6 months, and face-to-face training at Fort Knox for a couple of intensive weeks.”

Open learning content

Web 2.0 enables platforms that broaden opportunities to participate actively in content creation and editing. Some consumers have become producers whose work can in turn be accessed by far larger audiences than was previously possible. Some examples of resulting forms of education provision are as follows.

The Connexions Project from Rice University enables volunteers to contribute courseware for the formal learning of any subject at any level. Users can reproduce and modify the content, or contact the creator with editorial suggestions. Creators can make ongoing amendments directly and instantly. Both administrators and users can assemble personalised compilations of Connexions material into bound collections printed on demand. The project is funded by Hewlett Packard and the Hewlett Foundation, and claims to have nearly one million unique visitors a month.

Curriki is a US website to which any US teacher can submit content for the K-12 Curriculum. Successful contributors are paid $500 – $1500 and their content is put online for free use by other teachers. Curriki is run by the GELC, a non-profit company founded by Sun Microsystems and funded by Nortel, a major infrastructure company, and has 46,000 registered users.

Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopaedia that “anyone can edit.” It has a number of relevant elements which can all be contributed to and edited by users, including: Wikibooks (a free library of educational textbooks), Wikiversity (educational and research materials and activities), Wikispecies (a directory of species data on known life forms) and Wikimedia Commons (a repository of images, sounds, videos and general media, containing over three million files). English-language Wikipedia is consistently ranked among the top ten most visited websites in the world. It is owned by the charity Wikipedia Foundation and grant-funded. The German-language Wikipedia has state funding. Other wiki encyclopaedia projects have recently launched, including Citizendium and Knols.

Finally, MIT Open Courseware provides free learning resources for all MIT courses online. Unlike the other examples, only MIT staff can contribute content, and users cannot amend the content. The project costs MIT US$4million a year to run, but attracts 25 million visitors annually whose feedback confirms to MIT the value of its ongoing investment.

Open learning content providers such as these support new types of relationships between the consumers and producers of educational media. Social software supports new types of communication and exchange between learners, teachers and peers.

Social software

“Each day, consumers upload 100,000 videos, watch more than 200m video clips and view more than 1.3bn web pages at social networking sites.”

Web 2.0 collaboration and many-to-many communication tools are used for learning in a variety of ways. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype offer synchronous voice, text and video communication between individuals and groups, mostly free of charge. VoIP is used for language learning, media sharing, and communication among students, teachers and their contacts. Skype uses excessive bandwidth and for this reason at least one University has attempted to ban it, but relented following protests from students and faculty. However, tensions between institution and technology, and the debate around Skype, persist on many campuses.

Blogs are widely used for peer learning on informal and informal subjects. Some interesting examples are stackoverflow.com, a highly active Q&A site for the web developer community. People who are stuck post their questions to the ‘crowd’ – and helpful answers usually return. As all members of the crowd get stuck at some point and can only be helped by other crowd members, mutual need and reciprocity sustain active engagement. Ask.metafilter.com is a popular Q&A site of unbounded subject matter; the knowledge exchanged ranges in topic from pure mathematics to parenting, spirituality and car ice scrapers.

Alongside these demand-led peer learning sites where activity starts with a question are supply-led peer learning sites where activity starts with an answer, often offered in video form. Sites with a specific learning angle include 5min.com and videojug.com, which offer short, free ‘how to’ videos on a range of subjects. Youtube has very broad user-generated video content that contains some items with learning value, such as a rap about physics that has been viewed 3.7 million times and lessons in playing the Mbira thumb piano.

While the broad trend is for content to be free, some pay-per-download sites thrive. Peepcode.com is a video tutorial site that is highly valued by developers working with the programming language Ruby on Rails. Tutorials made by a closed group of experts are downloaded for $9 each. These packets of knowledge – produced swiftly in response to a rapidly developing subject such as a new programming language, and accessed by the learner in response to a real-time learning need – present interesting examples of new digital provision of professional learning support which will be further explored in part two.

Two new sites connecting people who wish to learn with people who wish to teach have launched this year. The School of Life enables informal adult learners to contact experts on the database to arrange “an hour of chat in exchange for a fee.” The School of Everything is a matchmaking site for self-defined learners and teachers of unbounded subject matter, who arrange face-to-face meetings. The site is used to support life-long learning, informal learning, private tuition, and home schooling. Some learners use the site to self-organise into classes and share a teacher, and school teachers in other countries have used the site to find experts to invite into school. Membership is growing at 50% a month.

Other social software tools worth attention include collaborative design tools where users post ideas for the crowd to develop – for example, crowdspring.com. Google’s collaboration tools include shared documents, calendars and blogs. These make it easier for communities of learners, be they formal or informal, local or distributed, to work together. Some institutions – for example the six Bloomsbury Institutions within the University of London – are developing their use of Google’s free collaboration tools for teaching, learning, administration and research.

Finally, in the space between social software and institutional software is the rise in the provision of open source and free learning platforms. At the forefront is Moodle, recently identified as the most popular VLE in UK secondary schools. While Moodle is free, adaptable and developed by its users, other learning platform providers have gone further in enabling users to put together their own learning platforms. Unsurprisingly, there is “a fierce debate between proprietary suppliers and open-source supporters.”

ebooks

There is current trend towards personalised, ‘cut and paste’ arrangements of knowledge in discreet units, regularly updated and printed on demand. Some publishers are moving towards a new form of provision, away from printing ‘books’ and towards producing ‘playlists’ of short discrete topics. O’Reilly is one of the biggest publishers of computer books. It sells topic-specific PDF documents, usually of fewer than 100 pages, and custom books made by splicing in chapters and topics from the whole library. The modular format enables O’Reilly to publish new material before there is sufficient content for a book if demand is there.

CourseSmart is a year-old service owned by five publishers. It allows students to subscribe to a textbook and read it online, with the option of highlighting and printing out portions of it at a time.  The Connexions Project’s user-compiled print-on-demand collections have already been mentioned. Content formed in this way challenges traditional publishing in both agility and price. Introduction to Economic Analysis is on reading lists at Harvard University and has a market value of around $200. Its author put it online for free download in word or PDF, and two print-on-demand companies sell bound copies for $11 – $60.

Devices

The range of devices through which people digitally access learning experiences continues to grow. Professional training organisations are providing multimedia learning content for iPods; developers have created interactive physics simulation games that school children play on phones; in November 2007 Amazon launched its Kindle electronic ebook reader, and the Japanese market for mobile phone ebooks is now worth US$83m. Personal computers continue to get smaller, lighter and more powerful, while the trend towards single devices that perform a variety of functions remains strong.

Learning in virtual worlds

In 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term ‘metaverse’ to describe an immersive 3D virtual environment “in which everything from business to entertainment could be engaged in by any user, anywhere in the world, with access to a terminal.”

Sixteen years later a number of 3D ‘metaverse’ territories exist, and the most popular, Second Life, has 15 million registered members. Learning sites within Second Life now include:

• The Virtual University of Edinburgh
• ‘Second Health,’ Imperial College’s Hospital Polyclinic
• A Sexual Health SIM in Second Life from the University of Plymouth
• Harvard Law School’s Austin Hall
• Ohio University’s Second Life Campus.

Universities are using virtual worlds to provide distance learning, and learning with simulation. Students at Harvard Law School practice in virtual courtrooms, a US graduate student researched and ‘defended’ his thesis in Second Life, and some scientists are working within Second Life to create and observe 3D models and simulations. 3D virtual environments are also being used by professional training providers, particularly for the military.

Teen Second Life (TSL), a separate site for 13-17 year olds with carefully policed access, hosts a growing number of youth education projects. Global Kids, a New York-based non-profit company, was the first mover at the invitation of Linden Lab (creators of Second Life). They provide summer camps on global issues in TSL, and director Joseph Barry describes learning in Second Life as “on the cutting edges of progressive pedagogy.”

Like ‘first life’, Second Life plays host to a wide variety of education providers, from the anytime-access weather visualisation simulations from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Authority, to identikit representations of real world classrooms that have specific value when attended at specific times, to an island created by a psychiatrist to help people experience how it might feel to have schizophrenia. They may have Second Life in common but they represent a broad range of pedagogical approaches for formal, informal and social learning.

Assessment

Simulation assessment technologies are currently used in pilot and medical training. In diagnosis training and formative assessment, for example, computers describe symptoms and ask the learner to make a diagnosis. They track performance by recording how quickly an accurate diagnosis is made.

Computers are marking students’ essays perhaps as competently as the average human. The US Graduate Records Examination essays are marked by a human and a computer using ‘e-rater’ software from non-profit e-assessment provider ETS. Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, reports that if the marks differ by more than a grade, a second human marks the paper and more often agrees with the computer’s score than the first human’s. Pearson Digital has its own rival technology, and Angela McFarlane points to similar interesting innovations.

It is noteworthy that Pearson, a leading publishing company, is diversifying into intelligent assessment technologies as one of many digital products and services provided by Pearson Digital. The fundamental challenge that new media presents to the publishing industry was clear from the 1990s: between 1990 and 1997, Encyclopedia Britannica experienced an 83% drop in sales as the internet began to provide people with free knowledge. Now that the internet and cheap, print-on-demand publishers are providing free and low cost learning materials of competitive quality, the giants of publishing must diversify and digitalise in order to survive.

Further new and potentially disruptive technologies are emerging on the horizon. ETS’ ‘c-rater’ software analyses paraphrases and compares student phrases to 100 possible good answers to judge their quality. Dylan Wiliam imagines that this may develop into what he terms ‘third generation’ digitally enhanced pedagogy, in which software analyses a group’s work and assists teaching and learning by identifying key themes and common errors more quickly and accurately than an average unassisted teacher could do.

Cambridge University’s Local Examination Syndicate (UCLES) has experimented with conducting physics ‘O’ level examinations online. They found a relatively poor correlation between paper based results and digital results, suggesting the need for further research and development if the use of digital technologies for formal examinations is to be developed.

Public services broadcasters

The new Channel Four Innovation for the Public (4ip) website summarises its position succinctly: “interactive media not tv”; “networks not broadcasters”; “a post-broadcast world”.

Channel Four sees itself in “a critical process of evolution: from a publisher broadcaster into a multiplatform network, from a commissioner of TV programmes into an investor in original interactive media products & services.” It plans to develop a cross-platform approach to delivering educational and schools content and services, along with a new pilot fund for creative output aimed at older children. Over the next two years Channel 4 plans to invest £50 million in providing public service content through digital media with 4ip.

Like Channel 4, the BBC is constructing its strategic response to a changing climate for public service broadcasting, characterised by declining audience satisfaction and a gradual shift in usage hours from television to the internet. The BBC aims to share more of its content and expertise, while providing its core educational content across platforms. Foster and Terrington (2008) argue that the full potential of cross-platform, ‘360 degree’ delivery won’t be experienced until bandwidth is expanded significantly by fibre to the home.

While both the BBC and Channel 4 comfortably inhabit the intersection between formal and informal learning at all ages, the BBC has a more formal curriculum association while Channel 4 claims to occupy a more ‘edgy’ space. In the short term, Channel Four plans to move from targeting teachers to targeting students directly, partly because learners’ access to multi-device web connectivity is better outside of school.

Part 2: Discussion

The trend towards free, open and peer produced learning media

The trend towards “what may prove to be the most powerful industrial model of the 21st century: peer production” is seen by some commentators to be part of a broader economic trend where “closed groups and companies give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.” Technology has reduced the cost of enabling groups to communicate and co-ordinate, making it cheaper to facilitate voluntary or nominally remunerated contributions than to pay and manage professionals.

As participation opens up, power to influence the contributions reduces, and many commentators argue that this reduces reliability. Some argue that Wikipedia, for example, is vulnerable to abuse by those pursuing an agenda, and to error and bias.

Others argue that all knowledge production is open to some degree of bias and error, and emphasise the importance of critical thinking skills and source appraisal for all learners. Research published in Nature compared the accuracy of Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Britannica, and found an equal number of serious errors in each (four), and a slightly greater number of minor errors in Wikipedia (162, compared to 123 in Britannica). Others see this as evidence that formal publishing is also vulnerable to error and that the ‘crowd’ is fairly good at correcting itself: “Wikipedia works in most cases because errors are often clear, and, where they are not, collective wisdom can usually remove inaccuracies over time.”

Wikipedia and Connexions report that they continually invest in quality improvement mechanisms, and Wikipedia in particular is carefully controlled by a tight hierarchy of contributors. Critics point to the contradictions between the power hierarchy and the “myth” of open-ness. Yet policing is necessary in liberal systems: if the open liberty is valued, the policing must also be accepted. The criticisms may be seen as an invitation to open content providers to describe themselves more accurately.

Alongside issues of accuracy are questions about quality. Contributions in unconstrained social systems tend to follow ‘the power law distribution’ in which a few people contribute a lot and a lot of people contribute a little. Some argue that there is fresh value in that “long tail” of micro and amateur contributions. Indeed, when before was a rap about physics viewed 3.7 million times?

But for every rap about the Large Hadron Collider, there are countless items of poor quality. Navigation and time efficiency have become key issues. Virtual Learning Environments may help, but the response is still at the institutional level; a music teacher in Suffolk may have similar needs to a music teacher in Dumfries, but the resources stored by one won’t be accessible to the other. The same work is reproduced thousands of times.

Open source and user-generated learning materials are like a new landscape we have no shared map for yet. Investors and innovators are rumbling around in search of the new navigation applications, and projects like LikeCube are starting to emerge. Some go as far to declare that navigation will define the internet’s next phase: “Web 3.0 will be about mass content navigation.”

In the age of navigation, Foster and Terrington suggest, users will rely heavily upon trusted navigation brands. “Time Berners-Lee, widely regarded as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has argued that the future of the internet – the so called semantic web, or Web 3.0 – will hold the expert, the aggregator, the brand, as key.” They argue that Public Service Broadcasters, among the most broadly popular brands in the country, are well placed to play that role.

Implications for professional content producers

Despite the rise in user-generated content, audiences still value the professionals. A recent survey found that 62% of people questioned reported preferring professionally produced content, with just 19% preferring amateur productions.

But Dutton (2002) argues that a sustainable stream of professional content cannot be expected if the revenue stream is not also in place, and others agree that there are “real challenges ahead in finding viable business models to drive the next stage of internet content provision.” Colin Hughes, Managing Director of Guardian Professional, holds that “where content is essentially generic you are no longer going to be able to charge for access to that content.” He looks for future revenue to new markets and unique content that cannot be easily reproduced, such as Guardian Newsdesk. The UK’s major education publisher, Pearson, is expanding its work on digital services such as intelligent tutorial and assessment systems described in part 1. New business strategies are required and emerging.

Open and shared content raises complex Intellectual Property issues. In the music industry, the ‘rip, mix and burn’ model that Connexions applies to educational content is illegal. “We have to find an IP framework that makes sharing safe and easily understandable,” argues Connexion’s creator, Richard Baraniuk. Colin Hughes is working to create exactly that: a Business to Developer (B2D) IP model whereby Guardian Professional shares its data but retains the rights and a share of any revenue made by a third party using it. Hughes perceives an imperative to create the model. “Heaven knows what’s going to happen with this technology, but whatever we do we need to go with it. We have no option but to keep going with it.”

Lifelong learning and the learning society

Contemporary discourse on workplace learning is shifting away from a focus on training – “an instructor-led, content-based intervention” towards learning, “a self-directed, work-based process, leading to increased adaptive capacity.”

“The rise of wireless, wearable and mobile technologies puts increasing emphasis on offering short bursts of learning when and where the learner needs it,” suggest Bonk et al. As described in part one, we see this starting to happen in, for example, ipod professional learning resources and bite-sized instructional videos for web developers.

The literature suggests a shift in responsibility for learning from employer to learner, and learning as “a diffuse and dispersed activity taking place across the organisation.” Bonk suggests that the role of the trainer remains critical, yet becomes an on-demand mentoring and navigation service.

The language speaks of a learning society. Information is a site of power and its opening causes the erosion of hierarchical authority structures. In its place rises the network organisation and the knowledge worker, “agile professionals referred to by Robert Reich as ’symbolic analysts’. They are learning-oriented, because their unique human capital derives from continuous learning in their professional endeavours.”

Bonk predicts that “the differences between workplace training and formalised learning environments will … begin to shrink,” with company workers learning and studying while University students embedded in the workplace use ICT to report back. Paul Miller, creator of the School of Everything, argues that “for the school system to be the main thing we think about when we discuss education policy is outdated. Schools will be ten per cent of education policy in twenty years time. Learning will have to focus on helping you continue to learn throughout your life.”

For Yang (2008), the debate is characterised by “over-enthusiasm and underestimation.” 70% of professionals surveyed preferred face-to-face to e-learning activities. Noble (2001) raises concerns over the quality of distance learning, arguing that as reach increases, richness decreases, and the resources required to deliver good quality e-learning are underestimated. Chris Collins points out that virtual worlds are limited by their lack of interoperability, and many are concerned about transferring human activities from territories ruled by democratic governments to a territory ruled by Linden Lab Inc.

Research by Sugata Mitra suggests that learning functions as a ’self-organising system’ where motivation is sufficient. Leitch (2006) argues that motivation is frequently insufficient, and points to broad low aspirations in the workforce. Alongside the rise of the knowledge worker, just 30% of UK jobs require degree level skills. Stoll argues that we should “keep computers out of schools,” and McFarlane (2008) reminds us that the evidence that ICT benefits learning outcomes is thin, and of the evidence that points to the converse.

It is possible that, at this early stage, the main beneficiaries from embedding ICT into learning may be the companies that provide devices and infrastructure. The Infrastructure company Nortel, which funds the US ‘open source’ learning website, Curriki, had profit margins of 43% in the second quarter of 2008, on a quarterly revenue of $2.3bn.

Finally, many commentators point out that we lack a shared national sense of the purpose of education. Hock (2005) argues that greater motivation, engagement and activity can be elicited from people in an organisation when power and ownership are localised as much as possible, with one key condition: that the purpose and principles of the endeavour are understood and bought into by all, and defined as collaboratively as possible. Hock was the leading creator of Visa, named the largest business organisation in the world: 1/6 of the world’s population is its customer. Though Visa provides a less complex service than the governors of learning, its scale may make it a valid subject of study.

Part 3: The Future

The first possibility when considering the future is always that very little changes. “You know how long [schools have] managed to resist the kind of organisational change which every other part of the economy now regards as ordinary and normal.  So it continues to be a fair bet that they will carry on doing that I think.” Yet it is also reasonable to expect some degree of change. Some possibilities are as follows.

We could witness the arrival of effective ‘intelligent tutor systems’ (ITS) “in which every learner will have an expert system helping them learn.” Like GPS, the system would monitor a learner’s position and aims, and suggest activities to assist progression. “We’re trying to move towards a position in which assessment is indistinguishable from learning,” says Dylan Wiliam of the Institute of Education. “What I’m looking forward to over the next twenty to thirty years is a focus on the design of effective learning environments in which assessment is integrated into instruction.”

Wiliam imagines that such a system could have several implications for assessment. The exam form could become irrelevant as the ITS would monitor a broader range of skills over a longer period, providing more reliable data than a few short examinations. This would disrupt the ‘teaching to the test’ phenomenon. What would learning look like if daily practice were assessed rather than, or as well as, the knowledge and writing skills displayed at the end of a period of learning? “Within five years we could have these systems up and running. The barriers are political, not scientific,” says Wiliam, who identifies conservative attitudes towards assessment as the main barrier.

The ITS is one example of a technology that potentially enables more personalised learning. In more deeply personalised learning environments, in which learners pursue their learning ‘journeys’ at their own pace, the grouping of learners by age can become unmanageable. New ways of grouping and supporting learners may emerge. An interesting aspect of the growing sophistication of distance learning techniques is whether and how those practices will permeate traditional education providers. A few universities are beginning to use distance learning techniques to provide new kinds of learning experience to campus-based learning communities alongside face to face instruction.

Some schools could, for example, use distance learning techniques to enable learners to take personalisation to the next level. When a learner becomes too specialised in a topic to find an appropriate learning community or teacher within their school, they could find it online. A ‘School of Everything’ style platform could be used to find like-minded peers and a learning facilitator; they would meet together in a virtual learning territory such as Second Life, and use the virtual world, digital learning materials and social software to explore their subject matter. In this scenario, students would work with a kaleidoscope of physical and virtual learning communities in a given day. Such a scenario would raise complex questions about resourcing of teachers in virtual learning territories, alongside issues of inclusion and exclusion in a given group of learners, that is, where the lines are drawn on age, nationality and so on.

Alternatively, it may be that the decoupling of age from stage would enable closer groupings of students by interest, level and pace within a single institution, such that virtual meetings become less desirable. Or institutions may not reach the stage of offering that degree of personalisation. We shall probably continue to observe the current combination, with most people learning and working within physical communities, while others in more remote areas or in need of greater flexibility make use of and help to develop increasingly sophisticated distance learning techniques.

These future potentials bring into question the balance between different purposes and principles of education. For example, distance learning techniques enable students sitting beside one another to connect with specialised and non-spatial learning communities rather than their neighbour. But just such a scenario appeared in one of the ‘Worst Learning Environments’ modelled by a group of fourteen year old boys in a Beyond Current Horizons consultation. In the boys’ model, people of all ages were in the classroom together sitting in rows, facing their computer screens and wearing headphones, with no connection to their physical neighbours, and no physical teacher or learning community to speak of. This prompts us to articulate the principles by which we navigate new technological affordances alongside a broader range of elements that are valued by learners and society as a whole.

Agile education provision that groups learners by interest, level and pace rather than by age and place would produce more diverse clusters of learners than are currently found.  If the range of learning opportunities broadens, would curriculum and accreditation follow suit? Joe Elliot, Head of Learning and Children’s Media at Magic Lantern Productions, is one of many commentators who advocate a reduced core curriculum and greater freedom for learners and teachers to pursue their particular interests, or a more diverse curriculum to select from.

In the US, the explosion of new accreditation providers and corporate universities has focused on post-16 education. A more diverse curriculum at any stage may invite a diversification of accreditation providers, and vice-versa. However, this potential sits alongside the powerful social and structural desire for consistency in the experience of pre-19 education, and the meaning of its certification.

It seems reasonable to infer from present trends that the range of players accrediting learning will continue to increase. Quality Assurance and recognition will become more complex. This is one element of a broader trend towards increased complexity, suggesting that navigation will be the key theme of web 3.0.

Bandwidth is reasonably likely to become the next frontline of the digital divide. Large global differences in bandwidth provision are already emerging.

In the publishing industry, “There is an impending disintermediation happening … that will be reaching a crescendo in the next few years” argues Baraniuk of the Connexions project. Perhaps intermediaries such as publishers will become new types of navigators in a digital future. The experiential value of a paper-based novel may have a secure place in our future, but for non fiction texts our contemporary ‘cut and paste’ or ‘playlist’ approaches to accessing knowledge online are likely to keep working their changes into publishing.

As we discuss the growth of ICT in our learning, it may be unwise to completely ignore its carbon cost, particularly as the prices of oil and carbon rise and the availability of oil falls. Some estimates have put the carbon footprint of the global ICT industry as equal to the global aviation industry, and the average carbon footprint of a Second Life avatar as equal to that of a Brazilian. Ubiquitous digital technologies may not be financially or politically feasible in a carbon-constrained future.

Alternatively, greener technologies and energy sources may move centre stage, and distance communication tools may have to take over from a dependence on flying. But how many international business and social relationships would we maintain in a future where the cost of transporting goods and people is very high?

Contextually, our regional strategic narrative around the development of a knowledge economy competing in a global marketplace may shift in the phase directly following the scope of this paper, that is, from around 2035 onwards. With reduced transport capacity, national economies may need to develop more mixed, localised models. There is also some likelihood that climate change will render vast areas of inhabited territory uninhabitable, and vice versa, over the course of this century. This would lead us into a new era of geopolitical relations. This is worth mentioning because it may alter our notions of the priorities for education in coming years.

Part 4: Key Issues and Conclusions

Web 2.0’s theme of participation has brought a powerful and disruptive trend of open-ness and peer production, and with it have come new approaches to the creation of learning media, new kinds of learning communities and peer relationships, new kinds of professional training and even new kinds of school and university. Innovative practice is not expected to dry up.

As choice and complexity slowly explode, the need for effective navigation comes to the fore: indeed, navigation is likely to become a defining characteristic of the internet’s third phase. Learners in future may navigate through, for example, peers, new navigation technologies, and actors such as Public Service Broadcasters who may take on the role of navigator.

The rise of free and cheap learning resources presents traditional production and publishing industries with a challenge. At the same time, demand for professionally produced, high quality content remains strong. Good businesses are adept at navigating changing markets, and winning players will be those who successfully find new markets, and new models of revenue, business and IP. The pressure on them to innovate may be to the benefit of many.

Public Service Broadcasters face a similar challenge. If we continue to value their quality and unique position in education provision, more future funding may need to be directed towards cross platform delivery of public service content.

With literally millions of websites offering useful learning resources and connecting learners with useful people, there’s a rich world out there for those who know how to find what they need and manage their own learning. For this to translate into improvements in engagement and attainment, and more high quality personalised learning experience for the majority of learners, the organisational response is key.

In the workplace, the successful organisations will be those who balance connections to the community beyond the organisation with the quality of the community within the organisation, and who help their people develop their professional practice in dialogue with mentors and peers developing similar practice within and beyond the organisation.

In the school, the picture is similar, with the addition of a local and national demand for a personalised learning experience alongside manageability, security, and reassurance that learners are getting something very similar to those at the other end of the country. The most feasible way of meeting these demands may be to group learners within a school by level, pace and interest rather than by age and subject, reorganising within. Once that happens, the potential to plug whole groups of similar learners into the world beyond the school becomes less threatening and more of an interesting opportunity for learning communities to manage together.

One can become quite playful speculating whether the new diversification of organisations offering accreditation will continue, and if so, where it will go. From the McDonalds Award for Restaurant Management, will we see The Apple award for ICT Proficiency, the JK Rowling award for Creative Writing, or The Guardian award for School Journalism? Again, if and when the landscape becomes increasingly complex, navigation and quality recognition become central issues.

At the meta level, the overarching theme from the reading and conversations that have fed this paper is that the purpose and principles by which we navigate these new and unfolding education landscapes are not currently clear or shared among stakeholders. Today’s education system is largely designed upon ideas formed by a more narrow group of people in and for a different era. A national conversation about the purpose and principles of learning today and in the future, at all levels, may be a useful next step.

Our education system is not something to be ashamed of. But it could be even better. It may be that by holding control so centrally – by placing the decision about what is learnt and when mainly with the government rather than mainly with the teacher or the learner, for example – we are holding education back. There is a possibility that by organising the system differently, much higher levels of engagement, motivation and attainment could be released. The point made by Visa’s creator Dee Hock is that it is precisely by agreeing upon its purpose and principles that a system can release power from the centre and distribute it more evenly, and that it is the more even power distribution that gives a system its energy.

The lack of shared purpose and principles may simply be a reflection of a healthy plurality; on the other hand, perhaps like a good national learning support system, purposes and principles should be able to accommodate some diversity. A conversation about purpose and principles can start with a conversation about values.

For example, it may be fair to say that we all value open-ness, participation, communication and collaboration, and that we value professional expertise and quality assurance. We value individuals and their free pursuit of ideas and interests; we value communities and the compromise that they necessarily entail. We value knowledge and innovation; we value health, the body and genuine sustainability. We value our economy and the role for education policy in ensuring a good fit between what is learnt at all stages of life, and what is needed to sustain a healthy economy run by competent, confident, adaptive people. We value the classics, the arts, and learning for the sake of personal development and wellbeing. We value diversity and flexibility; we value cohesion and manageability. We work together, with hope, towards a future of physical and social technologies that reflect these values.

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Experts Consulted

Dylan Wiliam, Assistant Director, Institute of Education

Collin Hughes, Managing Director, Guardian Professional

Paul Miller, CEO, School of Everything

Joe Elliot, Head of Learning and Children’s Media, Magic Lantern Productions

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

See, for example, CompuHigh and Virtual High School.

Press Association, 2007

Hopewood et al, 2007

Waks, 2004

Hearn, 2001

Kane, 2008

Elliot and Woolcock, 2008

Digital Academe: The new media and institutions of higher education and learning,

edited by William H. Dutton and Brian D. Loader. London, Routledge, 2002

Bonk, 2005, p3645 (Bonk et al, 2002)

See Cohen, 2008 and http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

www.curriki.org

This phrase is controversial, as discussed in part 2.

http://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-enters-top-ten-most-visited-sites-10536.php

Email correspondence with the MIT OCW External Relations Director, October, 2008

User Generated Nation, 2007

Woo, 2006

See, for example, the Large Hadron Rap – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM and Mbira Lesson One: KarigaMombe on Gwara Nyamaropahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upRR9UgXjS8

www.theschooloflife.com/

According to the co-founder and CEO, Paul Miller, during an interview

http://sites.google.com/a/jiscapt.net/project-plan/Home

Besa, 2007

See, for example, Excel Soft, identified by Guardian Professional as the leaders in this area http://www.excelindia.com/index.html

Kenny, 2008

http://safari.oreilly.com/home

Cohen, 2008

Business Wire, 2005

http://sodaplay.com/creators/soda/items/newtoon_microgame

The Economist, 2007

Collins, 2008

See, for example, the Second Life Education Wiki. http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Institutions_and_Organizations_in_SL#UNIVERSITIES.2C_COLLEGES_.26_SCHOOLS

For readers unfamiliar with Second Life, Ohio University has a video demo on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA. Institutions purchase land on Second Life (with real money) and then construct their presence there.

PRLog, 2008. ‘Defending’ your thesis is like a viva.

Shepherd, 2007

http://ict.usc.edu/about

Au, 2007

http://www.metaversedl.org/NOAA.htm

Elliot, Jane (2007). What it’s like to have schizophrenia. London, BBC News, 19^th March.

See, for example, www.hmsgilbert.com and http://harvardmedsim.org/cms/

http://www.ets.org/portal/site/ets/menuitem.1488512ecfd5b8849a77b13bc3921509/?vgnextoid=e1b42d3631df4010VgnVCM10000022f95190RCRD&vgnextchannel=5416e3b5f64f4010VgnVCM10000022f95190RCRD

McFarlane, 2008

http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549125.htm

Bolge and Sukkarieh, 2008

Harding, 2002, and Harding and Roberts, 2002.

Foster and Terington, 2008.

Enders Analysis estimate cost of deploying fibre to home of 90% of UK households would be approx 14bn Euros. ‘Very high speed broadband: a case for intervention?’ Enders Analysis, January 2007

Anderson, 2006

For example, Shirkey, 2003 and at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051204-5682.html

Nature magazine, 2005

Foster and Terrington, 2008

see, for example, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357054.1357214 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_contributors and http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187286,00.html

The power law distribution describes a number of phenomena that follow the 80:20 rule, for example the Pareto law that 20% of the population earn 80% of the wealth, the idea that 80% of a businesses’ sales come from 20% of the customers, and the project management idea that you can get 80% of the job done for 20% of the cost. For more information see, for example, Anderson (2006), Surowiecki (2004) and Shirky (2003) http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

The Large Hadron Rap – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

http://www.likecube.co.uk/

Foster and Terrington, p176

ibid

Pew Internet and American Life Project: Online Video, 25 July 2007

Foster and Terrington, 2008

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

Colin Hughes of Guardian Professional in interview, October 2008.

Sloman, 2008, p4.

(2005, p3649).

Sloman, ibid

Dutton,2002; Castells, 2000 and 2001; and Harris, 2002.

Waks, 2004, p573

Bonk, 2005

Paul Miller, CEO and co-founder of the School of Everything, in interview, October 2008.

http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=research&article=5-1

Discussed in Dutton, 2002

Collins, 2008; Shepherd 2007

Mitra, Sugata. The hole in the wall: self-organising systems in education. New Delhi, Tata McGraw-Hill Pub. 2006. See also http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Discussed in Sloman, 2008

Sloman, 2008

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

I calculate that to be a quarterly profit of $1.13bn http://www.nortel.com/corporate/investor/events/q2earnings2008/

Colin Hughes, Managing Director of Guardian Professional

http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/IntelligentTutoringSystems

Wiliam in interview, October 2008

McFarlane, 2008

Foster and Terrington, 2008

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hh_4eJ8N4PXuE6TToc3Zq_7sf05Q http://blog.enterpriseitplanet.com/green/blog/2008/04/freedom-to-connect-verizon-carbon-negative-internet.html

http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/graphics/2001syr/small/01.17.jpg

There are two deeply entwined themes at the heart of this essay. First is the question of how the ‘geo-social’ relationships of learners, homes, communities, non-formal learning spaces, regions, schools, nations and the globalised economy may or may not change to offer different kinds of learning processes, experiences and activities. The essential argument here is to explore how different kinds of social relations, especially those which are located in reconfigured and/or virtual spatial relationships create different kinds of possibilities for learning. But there is also a second reflexive and more theoretical theme at work in the construction of the idea of sites and contexts for learning. It is only really socio-cultural understanding of the transactions involved in learning which place a premium on, and an interest in, sites and contexts for learning. From this point of view we need to explore how ideas about how we learn are bound up in our attempts to conceptualise the role of space and place within the learning process.

Some of the key ideas relating to the first theme were laid out in the Beyond Current Horizons challenge by Gill Valentine. Valentine identified three important trends which have underpinned recent policy interest in learning (especially in relationship to ICT). These include:

• The Changing Relationship Between the Spaces of School, Home and Community
• The Future of the School as a Physical Offline Space
• What New Sites of Learning are Emerging?

The other paper in this series by Andrew Harrison asked a series of questions within these frames, probing in more detail the relationships between the physical (and virtual) institutions of schooling as the place for learning and learning in other sites.

The essay is organised into four parts. The heart of the essay, Section 3, will take up these challenges, exploring in more detail the literature which is concerned with analysing learning from a spatial perspective. Quite what the spatial means and/or adds to our understanding of learning will, of course, form a key part this section. And whilst the challenges described above are concerned mainly with home and school and, to an extent, community (in this context primarily considered in terms of locality rather than affinity grouping), I will additionally attempt to look at larger scales (region, nation and the global) considering a series of ‘locations’ which may act as determinants on learning. Each part of this section concludes with an explicit consideration of how each ’space’ might play out in future scenarios.

The final part of the essay will then consider the implications of how this analytic frame (derived, as I have said, from socio-cultural formulations of learning) may or may not limit our ability to consider the meaning and function of context in learning in the future. However this essay begins by considering the role of context and site in learning in general (Section 1) before examining theories of formal and informal learning in Section 2, which is the most common way in which learning across different contexts is usually understood.

1. Sites, spaces and contexts: stories about learning

As is appropriate for an essay attempting to imagine possible futures, I want to begin by considering one of the most powerful narratives about education from the past, namely Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure. First published in 1895, it tells the story of a young rural child desperate to learn and study but excluded from university – symbolised by the distant spires of Oxford – by class and poverty. The novel makes a great case for the virtues of informal learning, in what we might call, different sites, and describes the early years of Jude hunched over books, reading surreptitiously and subversively as he delivers milk, for example.

The book exemplifies some key themes for our purposes and implicitly sets up a contrast between out-of-school learning as characterised over a hundred years ago and contemporary processes. Jude is a good example of a motivated, engaged learner. He learns outside formal schooling structures and systems (albeit obviously aping them at a deeper level, as shown in descriptions of him learning bits of the classics he does not ‘understand’). If Jude described a young boy playing his PSP under a desk we would, I suggest, categorise it as a subversive, transformative experience – which is what Hardy does. Indeed, the way Jude’s learning mimics forms of inclusion (reading the classics exemplifies the way that the possession of knowledge creates status, for example) is also a very contemporary educational concern. Yet, paradoxically, learning for Jude only reinforces his class-based exclusion just as it appears to open doors for him, and in the narrative of this novel such aspirations lead to tragic consequences. Although Jude is a fiction, studies of working class auto-didacticism unearthed by Jonathan Rose, place his existence and these principles in very solid historical fact (Rose, 2001).

Although not examined as such, spaces of learning like the milk cart and above all, the dreaming spires of Oxford, are also important. On the one hand learning only takes place in the space of the mind and so (like the milk cart) context is unimportant: it’s what happens cognitively that counts. On the other hand, Oxford, its architecture and colleges, is a profoundly embodied and material place from which Jude is physically excluded. It is difficult to separate Oxford from what Bourdieu, writing years later, would call its ’symbolic power’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990).

These twin poles of context (as both immaterial and embodying power) have been modified by more recent theory and again it is primarily through narrative that we can apprehend the deeper processes at work. In one of the classic studies of ’situated learning’, Lave and Wenger (1991) describe how Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia learn through apprenticeship. Rather than offering an account of learning as a disembodied cognitive process, they describe learning as a profoundly social process where it is indeed the materiality of interpersonal, contextual and linguistic interactions which provide the engine for learning. Building on notions of affordance offered by physical, social, linguistic and semiotic resources (Wertsch, 1997), these scholars represent a tradition which pays attention to context as the preeminent influence on learning. Shirley Brice Heath’s classic socio-linguistic ethnographic study of language acquisition and use in two different communities in the US is another well known narrative which shows how language learning is integrally related to context and is produced over time through social interactions and reflection (Brice Heath, 1983). Whilst Brice Heath may acknowledge the kinds of symbolic power represented in Jude, for her, as with the scholars of situated learning, context is all.

Clearly, as can already be seen, the notion of learning, as used across these narratives is not a uniform or monolithic concept. Indeed, whether there is a meta-process of learning (as a singular process) as opposed to the kinds of learning (as plural processes) that takes place across different contexts is open to debate. In this essay it is already two-faced. Learning looks to describe processes for people and at the same time represents a set of values and a broader social function. This inherent duality will continue to bedevil discussion in generalised speculation about the future, and certainly its fundamental ambiguity underwrites my next story.

The next ‘fable’ comes from a prominent American tradition deriving from a mix of constructivist epistemology and utopian idealism. Seymour Papert’s call to arms argues that if we compare a contemporary classroom and a hospital with those in existence a century earlier, the fundamental elements of a schoolroom are much the same as they were (both in terms of process and transactions as well as curriculum content) whereas, he argues, a modern hospital is virtually unrecognisable from its historic counterpart (Papert, 1993). This is a critique of learning theory as much as it is of schooling. The main response to this kind of challenge has been to proffer technological solutions to the perceived immutability of the classroom and indeed the wider role of schools. A recent report by the National Science Foundation offers this vision (NSF, 2008):

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance across a lifelong “digital portfolio,” making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning. Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic – from anthropology to biochemistry to civil engineering to zoology. Learning does not stop with K-12 or higher education; cyberlearning supports continuous education at any age, space, beyond the classroom and throughout a lifetime (p1).

Here the learning contexts are material but assumed to be kind of semi-transparent, unlike the social contexts in Lave and Wenger or Brice Heath. The NSF vision takes up Papert’s vision and offers a kind of distributed, networked institution. The same power relations represented by Jude’s Oxford remain, but the question of symbolic power has been circumvented by offering a more mellow and accessible world. Learning is here is fun (not a value that came into Jude), not very social in an interpersonal sense although clearly relying on a range of affordances and contextual cues. It is active and interactive and takes place in a continuous present (again in contrast to notions of ossification implicit in the city of Oxford).

Whilst an extreme psychological version of learning may imagine a mind in isolation, it is true to say that most theories of mind underpinning ideas about learning, especially those drawing on forms of ‘new learning ‘ (Kalantzis and Cope, 2008) now conceptualise social context as part of the learning process. However, like the NSF example above, sometimes that context is assumed to be what I called ’semi-transparent’; that is, a neutral unobtrusive medium through which the learning can take place. On the other hand the theorists of situated learning suggest that meaning is made in context and that forms of behaviour, attitude, and indeed all the other affective dimensions of learning, are constructed by specific social circumstances. In other words, learning isn’t just what happens in the head but is bound up with a host of other dispositions, attributes and orientations. Indeed current research is especially interested in how learning is bound up with deep questions of identity and identity formation (Lemke, 2008; Pollard and Filer, 1999). Indeed Wortham talks about how there is an approach to learning which is essentially ontological, in that it shows how learning is inseparable from what it mean ‘to be’ as a person and the identity-making process (Wortham, 2005, Chapter 3).

This more whole-person approach to learning raises hard questions about the role of context. Is this a new way of revisiting traditional concerns about who has access or how ‘environment’ affects learning? Or more conceptually, how does learning transfer occur if context is so influential? Does the contemporary approach to the situated nature of learning offer portability or fixedness? Much contemporary educational discourse focuses on notions of competence and skill rather learning as a way of drawing attention to performative, non-contextually bound capabilities but again this avoids ideas of abstract potentials that can be realised in different situations. In general, learning theory needs to remain unfettered as it skates between these two poles.

A final introductory observation needs to be made. All the discussion about context, place and site is premised on the use of spatial metaphors. This vocabulary derives from a recent tendency to add the spatial dimension to the historical and the social in what Soja calls a ‘trialectic’ understanding of social phenomena (Soja, 1996). The effect of this new kind of social geography has been influential in connecting educational analysis with socio-economic structures. This helps us understand learning at the micro level (individuals in their social contexts) with macro questions about broader and deeper context (national and global economy) in ways that aren’t just about differences in scale, but suggest deep patterns of interconnectedness (Leander and Sheehy, 2004). I shall return to this issue in the final section.

In summary, I have used snapshots of educational moments/writing as a way of trying to disentangle the different ways in which context has been used as a way of offering insight into learning. I have suggested that:

• We need to reconcile approaches to learning which focus on its social function in concert with how it works at the level of individual process
• That there are contradictory notions of the ‘material’ and ‘transparent’ nature of context within common understandings of what learning is
• That context is social in the sense of the interpersonal and the affective as well as the semiotic and networked
• That learning cannot be divorced from identity (or identities) as an ‘ultimate’ context even though this raises questions about transfer of learning across contexts.

2. Formal/informal/non-formal: epistemologies and knowledge-economies

This section describes some of the current thinking underpinning the idea that learning takes place in and across sites. In particular, I suggest that the notion of informal learning has gained greater currency in recent years as a way of describing some of the perceived changes in where and how people learn (Sefton-Green, 2008). It thus offers a way of conceptualising learning within and across different and/or new sites and learning contexts. This frame is, I would argue, an epistemological one in that it suggests different ways of knowing as much as it suggests that learning may be taking place in alternative and complementary time-spaces. However, this approach also raises questions of political economy inasmuch as ideas of informal knowledge and other ways of knowing are bound up with the changing economic role of knowledge(s) in different domains.

Although there are no hard and fast definitions of what formal, informal and non-formal education might mean, and the terms are often used interchangeably, it is useful to distinguish between school systems (formal structures supported and developed by the State), learning taking place as determined by the learner (informally), and the organised but non-formal sites of education. See also discussion in Sefton-Green, 2004; Bekerman et al, 2005.

Although these terms are not new they have been used with increasing frequency to describe the changing locations for learning and as such are central to the hypothesis behind this challenge. Yet, the interest in informal learning predates the kinds of structural re-organisation of education we are concerned with. Scribner and Cole started from the assumption that most research on learning derived from non-socio-cultural approaches looking at school-based systems of learning and argued that if we just accept the fact that the social organisation of learning differs from site to site, then learning occurring in the non-formal domain is crucially important (Scribner and Cole, 1973, p553).

This approach opened the door to a huge range of research of which language learning and literacy acquisition are the most prominent examples (Baynham, 2004). Implicitly, this work explored the complexity, the structured nature and the embedded social nature of informal learning, although learning language or literacy was the object of this study rather than the notion of informal learning in its own right. The more ethnographic and anthropological accounts of literacy and language acquisition also inscribed the study of informal learning as, in some ways, an adventure into the unknown.

Once it had become accepted that informal learning could be theorised in this way, that it offered a legitimate object for study, the key (and oft repeated question) becomes how we distinguish between formal and informal learning. Scribner and Cole focused on the social organisation of knowledge. In doing so, they also touch on the idea (followed up by later scholars) that debates about the nature of learning via this informal route is indistinguishable from the politics of education.

Because schools occupy such a central role in the organisation, transmission, and regulation of knowledge and accepted forms of pedagogy it is obvious that a discussion about informal learning becomes more than simply a disinterested account of socio-cultural (or even cognitive) processes. The critique of schooling as social reproduction, the analysis of the status of knowledge developed by Bernstein (1990) and the power of pedagogy developed by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) are all examples of how discussion about the nature of formal learning becomes a discussion about power in society. In other words, socio-cultural discussion cannot separate claims for the impact and significance of school (and out-of-school) learning from notions of how what gets legitimated in, for example, classroom settings, and individuals are subjected to, identify with, and ‘behave’ according to its process: this affects the nature of the claims that can be, or are made for informal learning.

Using informal and non-formal education as a way of exploring the politics of education partly helps us deconstruct the relationship between schooling and learning, showing, as we shall see below, how assumptions about the organisation of the project of mass education underpin versions of how learning works. However, it also helps us rethink the different roles and power of knowledge(s). In the NSF future vision for learning quoted above, the new technologies are primarily imagined as a way of accessing the same kind of knowledge provided by traditional academic disciplines but at different times or places. There is now an established body of study which is interested in how new kinds of learning (experienced informally and non-formally) is in itself developing new kinds of knowledge-communities. Here, studies of blogging are allegedly changing the nature of participation in the body politic (Shirky, 2008; Palfrey and Gasser, 2008) or scholars of computer games show how swathes of games literacy and in-game knowledge are learnt online (Gee, 2004: Shaffer, 2005). Although there is debate about how far, how deep and how meaningful these new kinds of knowledge are, it remains a key tenet of the shift towards valuing informal and non-formal education that other kinds of authority, other types of knowledge and other kinds of scholarly apparatus have currency and value.

There is now substantial literature about informal learning (eg Bekerman et al, 2005) and much of it does try to distinguish the unique and distinguishing characteristics of informal learning as a distinct mode; although it is also true that many writers do not, at the end of the day, generally hold onto extremely hard and fast distinctions between informal and formal learning, or between modes of informal learning and learning in general. In general, much of the recent study of informal learning derives from workplace studies and/or cultural anthropology and does not focus on young people. Taking these caveats into consideration, the literature on informal learning can be broken down along the following key axes (see Colley et al, (2003) for an extended and more detailed taxonomy):

1. Location. Where the learning takes place – how and if context is a determinant of processes

2. Processes. How the learning is organised, whether there are forms of accreditation and assessment: what kind of style or pedagogic relationship is used. How the learning is supported and whether it is collective, collaborative or individual

3. Purposes. Why the learning occurs, in whose interests?

4. Content. Whether the knowledge has disciplinary provenance, how it is applied theoretically and in practice.

In very general terms these elements underpin all attempts to characterise and describe formal and informal learning. The central role of location within this paradigm underpins the discussion in the following section which explores different spaces and the different dimensions of location.

3. Unbundling learning: homes, schools, communities, nation states and the global.

This section draws on the notion of unbundling as described by urban geographers. Graham and Marvin explain the processes by which discrete services within the urban environment (eg sewage, roads, gas, electricity, etc) all of which used to be delivered by a central urban authority have become increasingly unbundled as part of the process of privatisation and marketisation (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In some respects I suggest here that the idea of learning (as imagined by Jude, for example), which used to be understood as a unified and unitary process through the idea of schooling, is now fragmented and subject to a range of market pressures. This is not just the same thing as analysing the marketisation of schooling (see, for example, Kenway and Bullen (2001) and Ball (2008)) because we are interested in how the concept of learning (as opposed to just its practices) may have become unbundled as much through the idea of informal learning as through changing modes or locations of delivery. At the same time the idea of unbundling draws attention to geo-social contexts. Accordingly, the structure of this section begins locally (in the home) and then moves progressively outwards through schools, communities, regions, nation states and ultimately, via virtual technologies, to considering learning on a global scale.

In essence this section of the essay suggests that recent thinking about learning has investigated, and at times even constituted, this process of unbundling: and indeed argued that different delivery mechanisms now available in the home or virtually have contributed to an assault on schooling as the previous monopoly supplier of education. If this hypothesis is correct, whether and how the processes of unbundling can be further developed, and if so, whether this implies a further scaling across different levels (away from the narrow concerns with the individual in the home to wider ideas of the breakdown of schooling as a national project), will be key questions for the future of education. Here older humanist visions of de-schooling society (Illich, 1995) connect with neo-liberal visions of an expanding and fragmenting market as well as with cutting edge theorists of cognition and understanding.

Each part of this section contains a paragraph explicitly teasing out implications for future scenarios. The key principle I have applied is not how change will influence future models of education but more what will need to have changed in socio-economic terms to facilitate structural changes in education organisation and practice.

3.1 The role of the Home in Learning

On one level the home has always been a key site for education research and it is not appropriate to reprise all of these interests here in great detail. Whether it is exploring the impact of social class and background on educational achievement through the provision of social or cultural capital, or studies of language acquisition, or indeed the roles that parents play in developing and supporting learning with their child, it is clear that the home is always going to be a differentiated key determinant on people’s learning.

However in recent years these traditional concerns have taken on a new slant in two interrelated ways. First, the home is key site for the consumption and use of digital technologies, and from a range of perspectives, it thus enters into an educational field. Secondly, and of course in conjunction with this approach, the home has now become a key site for the marketisation of education and this too positions it within a larger socio-economic geography of learning.

Given that underpinning both of these concerns are long-standing issues relating to the role of social and/or cultural capital it is inconceivable that these issues of differential access, connectivity (social and technological) and participation will not play a key role in future models of education and learning.

The emerging and changing space of the ‘digital bedroom’ (Livingstone, 2002) is both a site for the consumption of edutainment media (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2002) and a new space for media culture. Here computer games and participation in online virtual communities seem to be creating a host of new ways of learning, being and knowing that challenge the epistemological conventions of mass schooling (Gee, 2004; Shaffer, 2005). These challenges are further developed by scholars analysing how the different ways of being young (as both child and youth) are changed by these new modes of behaviour (Buckingham, 2000): and especially analysing when these too come into conflict with what it means to be a traditional school student. Others suggest that this is re-negotiated in re-configured school/student relationships: see the collection by Knobel, Lankshear and Bigum, 2007.

At the same time as these cultural analyses of learning in the home have suggested important ruptures in educational relationships, there has been a flood of initiatives to turn the home into a new site for conventional education. Building on models of social capital, studies have shown how spending on educational opportunities via hardware and software is now an important part of how education has leaked beyond school boundaries and made the home a key site for complementary, and remedial intervention (Nixon, 1998). Of course this shift has obvious policy implications in terms of the equitable distribution of resources and challenging traditional ways in which education is imagined as a way of equalising opportunity.

Both the culturalist-ontological approach and the social/cultural capital analysis build on deeper concerns about how learning works and what difference education makes. These questions will remain irrespective of how deep critics of these developing trends maintain the level of change actually is.

3.3.1 Future Scenarios

The home is going to continue to occupy a key place in the unequal distribution of social capital which determines educational success. Families will continue to seek educational advantage for their children. If the State finds it acceptable to change the idea of mass schooling as an equalisation/baseline experience then the home will become even more important as a site for complementary, supplementary and remedial education. Such opportunities will continue to be exploited by the private sector. Homes may even become a site for obtaining credentials but income disparities will set significant political challenges for cohesion and fairness.

At the same time attention to quality of learning in the home will continue to act as an educational alternative leading to a constant struggle with formal knowledge practices. These tensions will never become resolved with the formal curriculum because they remain necessarily positional markers of class differentiation: and until differentiation stops being a primary goal of the education system, the politics of maintaining unequal differences will continue to seek forms of legitimation.

3.2 Re-distributing the School

The NSF vision described in Section 1 of learning science in a number of off-site locations and yet in a more ‘authentic’ set of learning relationships than those traditionally available in conventional schooling exemplifies our second key unbundled location. Whereas the home offers itself as an alternative (complement or remediation), ideas of opened-up schools working in a networked or distributed fashion is also a serious way of imagining different ideas of learning contexts and locations.

The central vision of networked schooling essentially unpicks a series of key ideas about the project of mass schooling. It is founded on the principle that the kinds of place-based resources (especially based on books) which defined the economics of schooling can now be more effectively and efficiently met by re-distributing the functions of schooling across other kinds of places and in other time frames as a way of ‘networking’ learning itself.

Intellectually, many of these ideas derive from attention to the metaphor of the network underpinning economic analyses in the 1990s (see Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and studies of workplace based learning which showed how attention to learning within organisations could work as effectively as any notion of command and control or hierarchy (Brown and Duguid, 2000). In one sense throwing the onus back onto the learner makes them the fixed constant moving through differing experiences and opportunities. This then creates challenges for communication, transparency, regulation, accountability and power (amongst others) according to one attempt to theorise these new forms of social organisation emerging out of these concerns (McCarthy, Miller, and Skidmore, 2004). In Education in the UK, these concerns have influenced two recent policy initiatives: Personalisation (Leadbeater, 2004), and Building Schools for the Future (BSF).

With respect to ‘Personalisation’, Hargreaves has argued that a range of innovations can stem from framing education in a more personalised way, exploring both its effect on teachers creating learning communities, stakeholder interest in participation as well as increased opportunities for challenging, varied and appropriate learning customised for individuals. (Hargreaves, 2003) Much of this thinking has additionally informed work around BSF as very particular way of concretising theory. In their visions for future versions of schooling – built around new types of school – publications like What If? (Rudd et al, 2006) – draw on wider understanding of extended and community schools (see, for example, Craig, Huber and Lownsborough, 2004) within a policy framework inspired by the joined-up-ness’ of Every Child Matters, to produce aspirational models of distributed learning.

Here an attention to principles behind educational experiments leads to more differentiated models of schools, with distinct social functions, as workplaces, community hubs and even as local markets. The institutional compromise which characterises how schools work in practice subject to the necessary normative power of standardisation cannot be found in such exercises. It is thus noticeable that the research literature describing ‘re-distributed’ schools ‘ is not as empirical or as theoretically sophisticated as that referred to in the section above, as to an extent, the literature performs an advocacy rather than a descriptive function. Accounts of innovative practice are, to an extent un-tempered with even medium term evaluations of impact, and certainly there are no large scale, widely accepted evaluations of any such changes around for use as change-models.

Studies of innovative school re-organisation are more cautious about examples in practice of the kind of visions outlined in the literature discussed here. This is not to say that re-distributed schools are not possible but that they require a significant change of emphasis across many dimensions, much more than just buildings or curriculum (as suggested by BSF) and that the English record of structural innovation is perhaps more patchy than some would wish. However, the principle of changing where, how and when students learn beyond conventional schooling is a fixed trope in futures thinking around the role of context in the educational imagination.

3.2.1 Future Scenarios

In the immediate future (up to 10 years) it is plausible to imagine schools partially redistributing learning, unbundling curriculum and diversifying pedagogic strategies but this may remain the preserve of innovative practice unless resources are made available to make such an offer open to all. Such changes will place immense stress on developing an appropriate workforce, and there is no evidence that the UK is capable of investing in this at present. If the delivery of education becomes increasingly stratified, it is entirely conceivable that forms of accreditation and assessment will move into a highly controlled, regulated but not centrally delivered model of education.

3.3 The Learning Community and (City) Region

Recent innovation studies have paid much attention to the role of the city region as a driver of economic growth (Athey et al, 2007) and have both implicitly and explicitly explored how such city regions work in relationship with and as part of local education providers (Gustavsen, Nyhan and Ennls, 2007). Traditionally Higher Education has been researched as playing a lead role in driving productivity at regional level and supplying labour for local markets. The European Union is especially focused on policy interventions at this scale. At the same time, learning has been explored at a community level, in ‘units’ larger than a school, but nevertheless explored as constitutive of, and in response to, the social construct of a local community. Studies like Local Literacies (Barton and Hamilton, 1998) or Making Modern Lives (McLeod and Yates, 2006), as well as the youth-centred work of Glynda Hull in San Francisco, have looked at learning and education as framed by routes and trajectories within the community. In the US the work of Luis Moll and colleagues on ‘funds of knowledge’, as a way of characterising ways of thinking, literacy events, language use and social practices in Mexican Latino communities (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti, 2005) has been influential. Such theories and professional development programmes explore the cultural knowledges and practices of minority communities in collision with the ‘mainstream’. They look to legitimate other ways of knowing and being for teachers and schools. Taken together this economic focus on the city region, and a social-anthropological attention to learning as a feature of community, suggests a meso level type of context.

Studies of learning at this level like Schooling the Rustbelt Kids (Thomson, 2003) offering a socio-economic history of the region in South Australia or even those studies drawing on a sociology of youth like the study of education-to-training routes in parts of London (Ball, Maguire and Macrae, 2000) often focus on the effects of schooling on life-chances: and so more properly use the second face of how learning is used in the this essay – looking at its role in society more generally, than as an ‘intra-personal’ process.

I suggest that this vast literature field belongs in this essay because these studies and this approach draw attention to the immediate social context in which learning takes place. They explore what difference learning makes to the life-chances of learners and shows how aspirations, opportunities as well as academic processes are constructed by these local political and economic determinants.

The important issue of what Phil Cohen called ‘really useful knowledge’ (Cohen, 1990), that is the kind of tactical-learning that might make a difference to what you do or become, is best articulated in studies at this level. The literature points to real limits, constraints and serendipities in people’s life courses. It also underscores the economic purpose of learning and how such determinants affect how learners understand the value of knowledge and learning-to-learn and add thus a depth to the kinds of approaches we have encountered so far. The more ethnographic research projects explore the formation of social identities at this level and this too offers an important corrective to any perspective that can’t see beyond the close-up. Any consideration of a generalised unbundled educational future has to acknowledge the reality of local labour markets and community knowledge as very real constraints on the impact of learning at this level. In particular simply paying attention to changes in technology or delivery process ignores this crucial determinant.

3.3.1 Future Scenarios

The key issues here are in what ways education focuses explicitly on its economic purpose in preparing for labour markets. The more this function predominates, the more local/regional needs will determine outcomes. Changing macro-political arrangements within England and the EU may assist in this process of regionalising the purpose of schooling: although this raises the prospect of an internationalised elite. At the same time increasing movement of peoples and the development of forms of cosmopolitan citizenship (Beck, 2006) may both homogenise and balkanize diversity of communities. These trajectories are opaque. The increase of large global corporations as dominant employers in certain regions will focus attention on the need for schools to meet local supply needs.

3.4 Nation States, the Global, and the role of ICT in unbundling

At present, education is conceived of as a national project. Most systematic investment in education is at the level of the Nation State. However, a key dimension of neo-liberal globalisation is that previous boundaries belonging to the nation are now opened to multi-nationals and different kinds of international flexibility. At present the curriculum and accreditation/qualifications are the remit of the Nation State and the governance of education is considered a question of national policy. In an unbundled globalised world, these assumptions may not hold true.

Not only might issues of curriculum context be supra-national but qualifications and even the market value of accreditation may look very different as individuals feel free to purchase their education beyond their immediate locale. The emerging trends of Cisco and Microsoft industry standard qualifications point to a level of a marketised supra-national curriculum authority. This perspective is at the heart of popular studies of globalisation like The World is Flat (Friedman, 2006). Although more geared towards higher education than schools, studies exploring learning at supra-national levels are frequently motivated by questions of economic competitiveness, with the world economy and employment in transnational companies the object of interventions. However, with the exception of studies of the English language, and possibly ongoing research into the use and take up of the International Baccalaureate, we tend to think of education being a national concern when clearly this isn’t an entirely tenable proposition.

There would be thus appear to be three dimensions to this analytic frame. The first, as outlined above, considers questions about governance, authority, and structural organisation; the second explores the ways in which learners can position themselves within the global flow as consumer-citizens beyond national boundaries; and the third investigates the growth of transnational forms of co-operation of which the open education (and open source movements) are the most evident. It is clear here that in analytic terms we are dealing with both questions of political authority and also the social effect of ICT, as clearly it is only through the use of such technologies that we might achieve the sort of unbundling that might enable this scenario.

There are now many formal and informal mechanisms by which learners position themselves in relation to the wider community beyond the immediate locale. In general this gives rise to two kinds of literature. The first explores curriculum projects that develop international links where learners’ sense of self and their focus is taken beyond usual boundaries: see, for example, www.chicam.org. The second explores learning in online and virtual communities, especially those constructed though game play, to examine how identity, co-operation, and simulation develop knowledge and capabilities: see for example the scoping of participatory culture in Henry Jenkins ‘White Paper’ (Jenkins et al, 2007) and the TLRP commentary on Education 2.0. In some respects the ideas behind these kinds of research link with some of the aspirations of the culturalist approaches I outlined in Section 3.1 above, as together they all suggest ways in which the learner is positioned differently, in terms of their identity and their putative agency, than within more conventional learning frameworks. Of course, whether this trend continues and how it relates to the formal curriculum remain areas for debate and policy intervention.

Finally, we need to mention initiatives that are beginning to unbundle the conventional apparatus of national regulated education systems, including publishing and content-driven issues. John Willinsky has argued persuasively (and developed practical online tools) to develop structural interventions that reposition the peer-review journal industry (Willinsky, 2006), and the contributors to a volume on ‘Open Education’ (Iiyoshi and Kumar, 2008) suggest a host of ways where international collaboration is genuinely offering both free (or more accessible) cross-border opportunities for study, research and curriculum development – all suggesting changing forms of pedagogy. Indeed the thrust of much writing in this area is that the un-doing of time and place (part of the unbundling, as I have termed it) requires the recognition of different kinds of learners than is currently produced though national education systems, eg Green et al (2006).

3.4.1 Future Scenarios

Unbundling the Nation State will lead to the growth of cosmopolitan elites who may well learn within a globalised assessment and accreditation framework. Some of the technologies underpinning these possibilities may well develop as a mixture of public good (open source/open content) and private initiatives. This trend will lead to an explicit two-tier education system. Jonathan Zittrain has shown how technological openness is engaged in a constant struggle with legal regulatory frameworks and the growth of ‘walled’ and ‘tethered’ appliances (Zittrain, 2008). ICT in Education is in the same place. The democratic, open and generative technologies which speak to individuals, support individualised learning trajectories and create communities of interest which offer an imperfect fit with State systems of control of assessment and stratification.

3.5 Summary

The structure of this essay has perhaps rather artificially followed physical scale, moving from the home, through schools to communities, regions and then to the Nation State and ultimately the global. At each of these levels there is considerable interest in opening up, or unbundling as I have characterized it, the socio-economic limits of each context to offer learners different authority and agency over their learning. At the same time, I have suggested that this isn’t a process of unfettered expansion because I have tried to weave questions of governance and marketisation into a study of pedagogy and learning, showing how regulatory issues constitute, shape and form the identities of learners and their learning.

Given the likely continuation of this unbundling process and the policies which will address the questions of equality bound up in such trajectories, my challenge is to ask what the political response to such possibilities will be. As always, the issue is to focus on what the purpose of schooling is and let the systems follow from such principles. Whilst the role of schools may change if political settlements alter the traditional role of the Nation State, opening up schools to a range of learning processes available also opens up education to the market. If that is acceptable to a new political dispensation then unbundling will continue apace: if not, then measures will need to be taken to regulate and equalise such processes.

4. Imagining Learning as a Spatial Project: the Socio-Cultural lens

This fourth and final section of the essay tries to reflect theoretically on how our dominant paradigm of learning-socio-cultural frames – both constitutes and is constituted by the idea of space, contexts, and sites. I am suggesting that if we are trying to imagine Education and Learning in 2050, inevitably we are going to use the way we conceptualise learning processes now and there is a strong tradition in educational thinking which suggests that dominant ways of thinking about learning are themselves the product of a contemporary set of social and political arrangements rather than deriving from any deep ahistorical abstract processes. In other words, how we imagine learning is as much the result of the relationship of learning theory to practices as it could be about anything else.

If this is true then it does two things. First it asks us to reconsider the implicit values in how we think about contexts, location places and sites, in any review of their place in learning. Secondly, it raises questions about we can think about the nexus of theory, practice and political arrangements that will define education in 2050.

Kieran Egan suggests that there are, in effect, a few ‘old’ models of education which get recycled and are anyway bound up with changing historical circumstances (Egan, 1997). Robin Alexander makes a similar point about fashionable cycles of educational theory (Alexander, 2001). The key point here is that the theories which each generation uses to explain its theory of mind, as Bruner would put it (Bruner, 1996), is not absolute. When applied to the range of discussion I have tried to cover here, we might argue that notions of informal and distributed learning are discursively produced by marketisation processes rather than just offering direct ‘justifications’ of changes in sites of learning. We should also consider that descriptions of practices become unproblematically translated into prescriptions for change.

One interesting speculation for future-gazing might be to reflect on the ways in which older theories of learning are still present in current educational discourse. Egan talks about the core principles of socialisation and of ‘entry into a conversation that began long time ago’ (Egan, 1997, p14). More intriguingly might be a way of considering the kinds of ‘neo-behaviourism’, usually a relatively discredited explanation of learning, which offer a different way of understanding some of the learning identities observable across new and changing sites of education. Rather than analysing new kinds of learning behaviour (in, say, computer games, or across network play) in socio-cultural terms, where the role of context is so important, might such kinds of attitude, or approach, be as explicable due to forms of behaviourist theory? Might such learning simply be an adaptation to changing circumstances.

It is not that I would necessarily advocate this interpretation, or even support it, but I do want to suggest that our current interest in questions of context, site, location may be as much a question of theoretical fashionableness as it is a way of shedding light on any truth about learning. If this is this case we have to be careful as we approach any idea of inferring a future for education because all we are really capable of doing is extrapolating contemporary theorisations of learning. And this, I am arguing, is simply a response to our contemporary politico-social settlement.

My final observation relates to space’s corollary: time. Whilst I have focused above on the unbundling of place in response to shifts in the nature of capital resources required to support the project of mass education, it is equally true that shifts in place are also about shifts in time. Just as a central theme in Section 3 has been the unbundling of a national model of schooling by a series of more distributed and dispersed providers, so it now seems clear that when you learn is as much up for grabs as where. It is true that many scholars exploring the role of context have focused on time in their analysis, so questions of a/synchronicity in chat , ‘just-in-time’ knowledge, and so forth are equally conceptually important terms in contemporary educational discourse, as much as metaphors of location and place.

One obvious implication here is that just as the theorisation of learning has become detached from simply the study of schooling towards more lifelong and life-wide processes, so the unbundling of learning from the resource-intensive capitalisation of mass schooling will mean that future education models will continue to spin out along the axes of time and place towards greater individualisation and niche experiences. Whether the structure of the State or even new and other structures of locale, region or community will begin to impose structure and homogeneity on this process of disintegration is a political challenge for the future. It may be as Sections 3.3 and 3.4 argued, that this idea of greater and greater individualisation will not work in an era of greater competition and standardisation, or it may be that diversification is key. As always, then, the key question is: for whom? Which sections of society gain and which lose? But, as I argue in the Futures scenarios in Section 3 above, that is what policy is for.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_spaces_places_andrew_harrison.pdf

The challenge of analysing and acknowledging the multiple timescales of human activity in respect of learning has also been recognised by, for example, Lemke (2000). This essay is itself spatially limited and does not allow me to discuss fully the role of time which, at one level, is part of any discussion of space. Certainly in Section 3 discussion of changing spaces is sometimes a question of time-shifting locations for learning and re-ordering places in learning narratives (where and when we study, take exams, and so on).

http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-nonfor.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/06/youtube.youngpeople

Gee’s (2004) ideas in respect of the significance of ‘affinity spaces’ in terms of participation are a particularly good example of this.

see especially the work undertaken by Thomson, Hall and Jones: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/projects/plt-creative-partnerships/index.php

See the ongoing research project: http://www2.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=18911and18911_0=19964

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, studies of mobile technologies often offer insight at this level because, although mobile technologies appear to position individuals in global maps, studies actually show how immediate social context is a key part of mobile ICT use (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda, 2006).

There is not space to discuss the role of English in this globalisation process (see Pennycook, 2006) and scholarship around Second Language teaching may be an important contribution to this level of debate, an issue we in the UK tend to be un-self-aware about.

http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/TELcomm.pdf

[12] The term justification is taken from Boltanski and Chiapello (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and is used deliberately to explain how capitalism recuperates artistic and social critique.

An idea for further study here would be to connect the scholarship of ‘precarious labour’ (eg Lloyd, 2005; Ross, 2003) which emphasises ways of behaving and being as the modality of working in the creative economy with the production of a certain kind of subjectivity produced by learning in digital-networked times.

See for example http://www.vanderbilt.edu/litspace/Synchrony/index.html

Many people regard language as a neutral conduit of meanings; for others language is constitutive of the meanings communicated. These alternative perspectives are relevant to understandings of knowledge as fixed and knowable or emergent and fluid, and are central to debates about the purpose and role of education in societies today.

Of equal significance is the Bakhtinian notion that all language, whether written down or spoken, carries evaluative overtones (Bakhtin, 1981). Words are imbued with the histories of their use and the values and assumptions of the individuals who produce them. In this way, as Daniels emphasises in his recent work on activity theory, social-cultural and historical values and priorities find expression in the discourses mediating classroom interactions (2001).

When pupils are encouraged to reason and argue about ideas they are being invited to adopt the habits of critical inquiry that test existing orthodoxies and challenge the natural order of things. They might ask: What constitutes knowledge? How is knowledge organised, interpreted and communicated? Who owns knowledge? Whose ideas are salient?

Such questions pose dilemmas for all those involved in education in a fast-paced technological world where the World Wide Web is widely regarded as an important and easily accessible source of global information. In addition internet networks and knowledge communication forums, such as Wikipedia, allow pupils to construct and exchange knowledge in new and original ways and often outside traditional school boundaries.

The dilemmas for teachers are heightened by a growing body of research to show that children learn more effectively, and intellectual achievements are higher, when they are actively engaged in pedagogic activity, through discussion, dialogue and argumentation (Mercer and Littleton, 2007). Thus, equipping children with the skills and habits of mind required for living in the 21^st century and beyond is a risky and challenging business for educators but one that cannot be easily ignored. Children need to develop the critical reasoning and inquiry skills that will enable them to participate effectively and safely in the wider communicative practices to which they have increasing access.

This review explores forces for change in education today. It begins by establishing the context for debate about the relationship between talk, learning and pedagogy and the foci of interest that account for the different directions in which research has developed. These include emphasis on the development of argumentation skills arising from investigations of exploratory talk, and dialogic teaching rooted in wider pedagogical considerations. The following sections are organised around ‘bridging themes’ suggested by Mercer and Littleton as routes to establishing a ‘unifying sociocultural, dialogic theory of how knowledge is jointly constructed and how learners achieve greater understanding’ (2007, p135). These are i) exploratory talk (and by extension argumentation) ii) dialogic teaching and iii) scaffolding. To these we add iv) purpose since this is central to human action at every level in the overarching activity system of education.

The review ends by considering how it might be possible to reconcile tensions between the need to introduce students to existing (cultural) bodies of knowledge and norms of thinking in ways that recognise the legitimacy of alternative perspectives and build on the experiences of individuals. It explores opportunities for capitalising on different kinds of spaces for learning inside schools and beyond.

Talk, learning and pedagogy: Context of a debate

According to Daniels (2001) teachers’ and students’ actions are linked to socio-cultural and historical contexts through spoken language and other semiotic mechanisms. This proposition is supported by evidence from observations of classroom interactions in England (eg Alexander, 1995, 2001) and in France, India, Russia and the United States (Alexander, 2001). Through comparative analysis of classroom discourse in these five countries, Alexander identifies five categories of talk observed in use:

• rote: the drilling of facts, ideas and routines through constant repetition;
• recitation: the accumulation of knowledge and understanding through questions designed to test or stimulate recall of what has been previously encountered, or to cue pupils to work out the answer from clues provided in the question;
• instruction/exposition: telling the pupil what to do, and/or imparting information and/or explaining facts, principles or procedures
• discussion: the exchange of ideas with a view to sharing information and solving problems
• dialogue: achieving common understanding through structured, cumulative questioning and discussion which guide and prompt, reduce choices, minimise risk and error, and expedite ‘handover’ of concepts and principles.

Alexander proposes that communicative practices in classrooms across the world assume a distinctiveness that reflects the way in which particular societies are organised, the manner in which individuals relate to society and each other, and differing conceptualisations of knowledge. Additionally, there is an historical dimension to talk as changes over time etch themselves into the discourses in circulation. All these factors lead to an overlaying and hybridity of practices. Teaching in English primary schools represents an amalgam of influences including the relics of the 19^th century elementary system with its emphasis on reading, writing, arithmetic and rote learning, 1960s progressivism and its subsequent backlash and the current return to ‘basics’ overlaid with ’skills’ and ‘competences’ (Alexander, 2008a, pp100-107).

Another enduring characteristic of English primary education is the emphasis on individual participation. Consequently, given the low ratio of teachers to children in many classrooms, learners are often competitively involved in a game of ‘guess what the teacher is thinking’ and a search for ‘right’ answers (Alexander, 2008a, p106). The dominant pattern of communication consists mainly of teachers talking with little uptake of children’s contributions – the recitation script alluded to above. Despite calls for teaching to become more ‘interactive’, research suggests that the ’standards drive’ in literacy and numeracy has been counter-productive with traditional patterns of communication reinforced rather than diffused (Moyles et al, 2003; Smith et al, 2004). It is difficult to envisage how communicative practices might alter without fundamental changes to the way in which knowledge is framed and learning assessed.

However, perhaps a radical shift in thinking is not what is required, rather a movement towards change set in progress by increasing awareness of the possibilities for communicative action and potential impacts on student learning and development. The forms of talk noted above have been categorised as one of several repertoires from which teachers might select, ‘on the basis of fitness for purpose in relation to the learner, the subject-matter and the opportunities and constraints of context’ (Alexander 2008a, p109). The remaining ‘repertoires’ include ‘talk for everyday life’, ‘talk for learning’ and ‘organisational contexts’ (eg whole class teaching, group work, individual tutoring). Although these latter have the potential to shape interactive opportunities and dynamics it is the quality and content of talk that are more significant for children’s learning (Alexander, 2008b, p40). Of the different forms of talk discussion and dialogue are singled out for their cognitive potential. In dialogic interactions, children are exposed to alternative perspectives and required to engage with another person’s point of view in ways that challenge and deepen their own conceptual understandings. It is the element of ‘dialectic’, understood as logical and rational argument, which distinguishes dialogue from mainstream oral or ‘interactive’ teaching as currently understood by many teachers (Alexander, 2008a, p27).

Attention to meanings alerts readers to subtle differences in research priorities which threaten to confuse all those mandated with responsibility for improving children’s opportunities to learn. Without deep understanding of the pedagogical issues and the actions required of them, teachers and teacher educators might view debates about the quality of classroom talk and the role of argument in learning and cognitive development as just another distraction, hence the need for some clarification of terms.

Words and meanings

Words and meanings are slippery and often have implications for human activity that reach beyond the particular socio-cultural, national and historical contexts in which they first entered circulation (Simon, 1987; Alexander, 2008a, pp97-99).

Wegerif draws attention to this problem in the context of research on educational dialogue (2008). He argues that although the term dialogic is often sourced to Vygotsky, his approach to psychology was actually grounded in Hegelian/Marxian dialectics. This is a philosophical stance in which individual development and human society advance through the progression of rational argument in which thesis and antithesis are integrated into increasingly complex syntheses leading to some version of a rational, unified society. This contrasts with a Bakhtinian understanding of human learning and development for which dialogue holds the key.

Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) conceptualised language not as a means of labelling objective, external realities but as a resource to be drawn on by social actors. Knowledge of who is speaking and the circumstances of the speech event (the sphere of activity, participants and tone and intonation of speech) are essential for any real understanding of the meanings exchanged in everyday life (Bakhtin, 1981, pp341-342).

From a Bakhtinian perspective (1981), dialogue is not merely a term for describing the structure of speech in discourse: it is a phenomenon that penetrates the very structure of words themselves. The many different meanings that words express are shaped in the dialogic interaction with ‘alien’ words at the moment of utterance. Speakers’ utterances, orientated towards the active responsive understanding of others, are selectively appropriated and assimilated into new concept systems. It follows then that every word written or spoken is filled with the voices of others and ‘there is no ‘overcoming’ or ’synthesis” (Wegerif, 2008, p350). Dialogue is not simply a precondition for learning but essential for knowledge construction and human development generally.

This tension between notions of dialogue and dialectic is yet more bewildering when the term dialogue is used loosely to refer to talk of any kind (eg Barnes, 1976) or defined more precisely as exhibiting dialectical qualities. Coffin and O’Halloran (2008) offer useful clarification from their interest in investigating the processes of argumentation in educational contexts. They define argumentation as the ‘process’ and argument as the ‘product’ of ‘putting forward and negotiating ideas and perspectives’ (2008, p219). They draw attention to two trends that have emerged in research in the past decade, the first linking argumentation and dialogue through socio-cultural theories of learning and development and the second focusing on argumentation, collaborative learning and problem solving.

The first trend relates to a reawakening of interest in dialogue from a sociocultural perspective. Reminding readers of the Vygotskian (1978) view of learning and development, Coffin and O’Halloran describe how transformations in learning occur when learners are able to examine and reflect critically on alternative positions through dialogic interactions with their peers or experts. Thus ’social argumentative dialogue’ (McAlister, Ravenscroft and Scanlon, 2004) is internalized and leads to the development of higher mental processes.

The second trend stems from investigations of collaborative learning and problem-solving processes with a particular focus on understanding how joint activities using computers might enhance students’ abilities to argue effectively. The imperatives of ‘learning-design’ approaches to pedagogy in which digital technologies are recognised for their potential to promote learning that is ‘increasingly more personalized, informal and emergent – rather than the outcome of highly structured institutional practices’ (Ravenscroft and Cook, 2007, cited by Ravenstone and McAlister, 2008, p318) have prompted researchers to investigate how development of effective argumentation might be supported and enhanced with appropriately designed ‘digital tools’.

Coffin and O’Halloran (2007, p220) suggest that one of the key features of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is acknowledgement of the role of ‘confrontation’ in complex problem-solving activities. Relating this to learning and development more generally they add: ‘complex-problem-solving is viewed as central to knowledge building with new knowledge derived from the argumentation process being integrated into existing cognitive structures’ (ibid , p220). Here then is a description of goal-orientated processes that are more akin to dialectical than dialogical thinking but occurring in computer environments.

Yet, encouragement of argumentative practices has implications for all those involved in education. As students are empowered to ask questions and reflect critically on the adequacy of information received, teachers may be re-positioned alongside pupils (and the internet) as alternative sources of support and information, rather than gatekeepers of knowledge. This challenges not only teachers’ professional status as traditionally conceived, but also their abilities to manage students who are nosier and more dynamically engaged in learning. Even supposing teachers are prepared to take these risks, they face other challenges, including their abilities to access appropriate software and to effectively scaffold children’s learning involving around new technologies (Coffin and Hewings, 2005; Yelland and Masters, 2007).

Is there, then, a viable case for promoting knowledge construction through dialogic interactions that have a critical or combative edge when the educational purpose dictates? This certainly appears to be the thrust behind Alexander’s conceptualisation of dialogic teaching. The following sections consider the evidence from a growing body of research.

Talk, learning and pedagogy: a movement gathers pace

In the last decade researchers have expressed interest in understanding dialogue as it is used to transact educational purposes in classrooms (Wells, 1999; Alexander, 1995, 2001; Wegerif, 1996, 2008 and with Mercer, 1997; Mortimer and Scott 2004; Wolfe, 2006). However, as previously noted, it would be erroneous to regard this group as a unified whole since the term dialogue is used in ways that reflect the interests of research communities that have followed two different trajectories – one focused on the nature of student-student interactions and the other on teacher-student interactions.

Of course, if we accept that language has an integral role in structuring experience and shaping meanings, and evolves as other aspects of human cognitive functioning develop (Halliday, 2003) then such divisions are fruitless. Dialogic pedagogies are premised on the ability of students and teachers to establish reciprocal relationships through language and other means. Similarly collaborative interactions between students are more difficult to effect when the wider contexts of interaction constrain the possibilities for dialogue. It is relevant for this review then that we probe these alliances with a view to identifying their commonalities and considering how they might be reconciled, if not in theory as Mercer and Littleton suggest (2007, p135), then at least in practice.

Exploratory Talk and Argumentation

Three studies from the late 1970s/early 1980s stand out as having particular significance for the development of thinking and research into classroom talk in England and elsewhere in the world. These are:

• An analysis of teacher-student discourse in secondary classrooms by linguists Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) who identified initiation-response-feedback (IRF) as the predominant form of classroom exchange. In this pattern of interaction teachers ask questions that test knowledge and permit little expansion of pupils’ meanings. Researchers in the US coined the phrase ‘recitation script’ to capture the repetitive quality of IRF (eg Tharp and Gallimore, 1988);
• A study of classroom communication in secondary schools, in which Barnes (1976) identifies the power of ‘exploratory discussion’ for children’s learning in small groups. Exploratory discussion or dialogue is characterised by talk in which children operate in hypothetical mode, speculating and asking questions that keep the discourse open and allow ideas to develop;
• The first large-scale study of primary classrooms in England (ORACLE – Galton et al, 1980) using systematic observation techniques which showed that although children were seated in groups, as befitted the enquiry-based classrooms of the 1970s, there was little real collaboration in evidence.

Taken together it seems that particular forms of classroom communication were identified for their potential to advance learning but were rarely observed even when the organizational arrangements and curriculum conditions were felicitous. Research in recent years suggests little has changed (Galton et al, 1999; Mroz et al, 2000; Earl et al, 2003). A deeper understanding of how and when such talk is desirable and the conditions under which it flourishes is still required.

Drawing on the work of Barnes and a study of the way in which common knowledge is constructed through discourse and joint activity in classroom settings (Edwards and Mercer, 1987), Mercer and colleagues turned their attention to investigations of student-student interaction with a particular interest in understanding the mechanisms of collaborative learning. This research led to identification of two communicative strategies, summary recaps and reformulations (Mercer, 1995, p95) that appeared to have particular salience for students’ learning in small groups and matched strategies used by teachers to gather information together and introduce technical terms ‘in situations where the context helps make meanings clear’ (ibid, p35).

In a later work (2000) Mercer referred to these together with elicitations, repetitions and elaborations, as ‘conversational techniques for building the future on the foundations of the past’ (pp52-56). Used judiciously, they have the potential to develop learners’ awareness of the processes of knowledge construction at the deeper levels of consciousness associated with transformation of understandings. Mercer also drew attention to three forms of argument, or ’social modes of thinking’, that underpinned development of the Thinking Together project (Dawes, Mercer and Wegerif, 2000). These include:

• disputational talk which is competitive and characterised by the unwillingness of participants to take on the other person’s point of view

• cumulative talk in which speakers build constructively and uncritically on each other’s contributions

• exploratory talk which proceeds by virtue of critical reflection and reasoned argument in which proposals may be ‘challenged and counter-challenged’. Crucially, ‘knowledge is made publicly accountable and reasoning is visible in the talk’ (Mercer, 2000, p98)

The team emphasized the importance of teachers agreeing rules for talk and creating a dialogic classroom ethos in which students orientate to each other ‘with a view to discovering new and better ways of jointly making sense’ rather than protecting their own identities and interests (Mercer, 2000, pp102-103). Given the demands made on children’s verbal proficiency and abilities to listen and respond appropriately to others in settings where they are often unaccustomed to having a voice of their own, attention to these relational and emotional factors is vital. As Lefstein reminds us, dialogue is not always comfortable. It is also implicated with ‘competition, argument, struggle to be heard, persuasion, “ego”, and like all other social arenas – power relations’ (2006, p6). It is encouraging then that despite any inherent risks the Thinking Together approach (http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/thinkingskills) is gaining increasing acceptance in the educational world, having been recognised by the QCA and BECTa and incorporated into the Primary National Strategy and KS3 Strategy for Teaching and Learning in the Foundation Subjects.

Members of the same team have since been involved in testing Vygotsky’s claim that ’social interaction shapes intellectual development’ through the medium of the cultural tool of language (Mercer and Littleton, 2007, p133). Mercer and Littleton report on a series of studies through the 1990s (Spoken Language and New Technologies/SLANT) in which researchers and practitioners sought to explore the potential of computer-based activities as contexts for joint learning in mathematics and science. Experimental software packages were used to raise awareness of spoken language and prompt discussion between students at pre-determined points in the tutoring sequence. Thus researchers were able to experiment with breaking the characteristic IRF exchange by introducing D (Discussion) after an initiating move. In their final project report (2003)

(http://www.nuffieldcurriculumcentre.org/fileLibrary/pdf/SMILEfinalreport.pdf.) Mercer et al noted that IDRF appeared to be ‘useful in allowing for active learning that can be framed and directed towards learning goals’.

The experiments demonstrated improvement in individual reasoning and attainment, as measured by Raven’s matrices, through students’ participation in collaborative talk and thinking together (eg Wegerif and Dawes, 2004). They allowed Mercer and Littleton to assert with some confidence that ‘Vygotsky was right’ in claiming that individuals learn through social interaction mediated by artefacts and cultural tools such as language, although they were careful to add that the beneficial effects observed resulted from specific kinds of interaction, notably exploratory talk and dialogic teaching (2007, p133).

Dialogic Teaching

Alexander (2004) suggests there is little to distinguish the ‘conversational techniques’ of recapitulation, elicitation and repetition from traditional recitation (IRF) teaching adding ‘only reformulation has potential to take a specific answer or statement forward’. Nevertheless reformulation does not in itself constitute a ‘repertoire’ of dialogic techniques: ‘what is said needs actually to be reflected upon, discussed, even argued about, and the dialogic element lies partly in getting pupils themselves to do this (p21).

Emphasizing the dialectic in dialogue and the importance of contextualising talk in pedagogical action, Alexander distinguishes between conversation that tends to be relaxed and may lead nowhere and dialogue, characterised by purposeful questioning and chaining of ideas into ‘coherent lines of thinking and enquiry’ – the dialogic principle of cumulation. This tilts control of the conversational floor away from the teacher’s initiating moves to students’ responsive utterances, the R in I(R)F. By listening and responding to what children actually say and do, teachers are in a position to support individuals more effectively in their learning, a principle enshrined in formative assessment (Black et al, 2002) and the extended notion of ‘learning as assessment’. Here learning is defined not only as acquisition of knowledge but more potently as participation in knowledge building practices (James, 2008).

These ideas fit within a constructivist framework which recognizes learners as active participants in the teaching-learning processes. Indeed the distinction drawn by Alexander between repertoires of learning and teaching talk acknowledges this mutuality. Nevertheless attunement of individuals to one another in any relationship relies on trust and respect for others. These conditions are often difficult to achieve in classrooms, thus a further set of principles are designed to guide the dynamics rather than the content of interaction: dialogic teaching is collective (teachers and children address learning tasks together), reciprocal (teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints) and supportive (children articulate ideas freely without fear of embarrassment over ‘wrong’ answers and help each other achieve common understandings) (Alexander, 2008b, pp112-113).

Dialogic teaching has been intensively trialled in Yorkshire, London and other parts of Britain and is now incorporated into professional support materials from QCA and the UK government’s Primary and KS3 strategies. Trialling in North Yorkshire (Talk for Learning) and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (Teaching through Dialogue) began in 2001-02.

The projects used different strategies to meet the ends of:

• fostering extended repertoires of teaching talk, learning talk and organizational form
• shifting dynamics and content of talk to meet the criteria of Dialogic Teaching
• repositioning approaches to meet principles.

Teachers used video to study and evaluate their practice, assisted in some instances by students. One unexpected and promising consequence of this enquiry-based project was development of children’s meta-linguistic awareness. In a Media Pack made available through North Yorkshire County Council (2006) pupils were seen discussing the dynamics and mechanisms of interaction using appropriate technical language. The episodes were naturalistic and filmed without rehearsal or repetition and are offered as stimuli for further professional dialogues.

The projects in North Yorkshire and London are ongoing with summary reports available online at http://www.robinalexander.org.uk/dialogicteaching.htm. In a recent evaluation of both projects, Alexander identifies some of the emerging challenges affecting change (2008a, pp114-9). These include:

• Evidence of widening gaps in practice as some teachers achieve more real change than others and are motivated to continue building on their successes

• Less attention has been given to developing the repertoire of children’s talk – their capacities to narrate, explain, ask questions, speculate, argue, reason and justify etc. Without the appropriate ‘tools’ students are limited in their abilities to think and participate fully in the discourses to which they are introduced

• The principle of cumulation challenges teachers’ professional skills and subject knowledge. It makes demands on their insights into the capacities of children and hence their abilities to offer scaffolds that link children’s understandings to the culture’s way of making sense

• Children are being given more time to think and respond but the challenge of building on their responses (the principle feature of dialogic talk), remains unsolved in many cases. Traditional communicative practices are ingrained in institutions and there remains a strong sense that teachers are expecting certain answers.

Responding directly to the first concern, Alexander (2008b) suggests that in order to effect a manageable transformation teachers might concentrate first on getting the ethos and dynamics of classroom talk right before attending to the content and progression of ideas. However the final observation points to an inherent difficulty arising from issues of power and authority that occur whenever people come together in groups but which are particularly salient in classroom contexts where inequalities between teachers and students, in terms of status and age at least, are a fact of everyday life. For although knowledge and expertise are intentionally omitted from this list in recognition of the different experiences that learners bring to their studies, it is important surely to value the role of qualified practitioners in children’s learning? Herein lies a conundrum for all potential ‘dialoguers’ (Freire, 1970) in the UK today.

The Bakhtinian notion of dialogue assumes an interweaving of voices in which individuals test their perspectives against others past, present and co-present. It allows Bakhtin to propose that our words and meanings are ‘filled with others’ words, varying degrees of our-own-ness, varying degrees of awareness and detachment (1986, p89). Surely then the notion of purposeful dialogue, orientated towards (curriculum) goals selected by the teacher, is fundamentally flawed? Alexander is interested in the possibilities for teachers and children to build on each other’s contributions in developing knowledge. Yet the suggestion that arguments are logically progressed, with irrelevant contributions falling out of the line of inquiry (cumulation), places huge demands on teachers required to steer pedagogic content whilst ensuring that children’s contributions are woven into the unfolding discourse. This is particularly problematic when teachers are faced with students’ bizarre or incorrect responses and raises questions concerning the extent to which they should stand back and permit children to explore ideas unassisted and when and how to intervene with new information. And what of the individual’s right to silence? There is a danger of conjuring up an idealized world that overlooks the roles of theorists, pragmatists and reflectors in collective enterprises (Freire, 1996).

However, as we have seen, Alexander recommends that dialogic teaching requires selection from repertoires that are appropriately harnessed to the task in hand and the activities through which they are mediated. Lefstein suggests this system of choices might be regarded as a pragmatic model of dialogue for school settings (2006, p12). Indeed the principles chime with Burns and Myhill’s contention that ‘teachers should be concerned with the interplay between pupils’ talk and their learning needs and [their] use of differing forms and functions of language to enable children to think and explore their learning through a real dialogue (2004, p48). Lefstein nonetheless builds a convincing case for supplementing Alexander’s principles with the criteria of criticality and meaningfulness in a bid to emphasise the benefits of ‘dialogue that starts from difference and proceeds through critical argument and inquiry to competing understandings and further inquiry (2006, p13) for he is concerned with the question: ‘What happens to difference that has no place in the official model of dialogue?’

Whilst it is important for researchers to tussle with philosophical issues it is essential also that teachers introduce children to these empowering discourses not only as tools for effective learning but as the means most likely to assist their development as active citizens and decision-makers in ‘the good society’ (Alexander 2008a, chapter 6), an imperative that takes dialogue out of the classroom to wider contexts of culture and society. The immediate challenge for teachers lies in knowing when and how to disrupt the flow of traditional patterns of communication. This requires a willingness to explore and experiment with their practices informed by awareness of the way in which interactions are affected by ‘generic constraints of space time and power and in response to the complex microculture of the classroom (2008a, p97). Without these principled understandings any changes in practice might amount to no more than superficial adjustments.

This brings our review appropriately to consideration of scaffolding and purpose concepts bridging many of the ideas introduced so far and linking this review to the wider framework of activity theory.

Scaffolding

As with many previous terms, the notion of scaffolding can be considered at several levels in the activity of education. Edwards and Mercer describe the role of teachers as ’scaffolding’ children’s entry into the universe of educational discourse (1987, p161). The scaffolding amounts to creation of a framework of talk and action that provides a platform for the development of common knowledge. This is important given one of the authors’ central arguments that higher mental functioning is distinguished by the levels of reflection and self-awareness awakened by an activity, rather than disembeddedness from context. In the Thinking Together programmes these principles are reflected in the requirement that children establish ground rules for talk that encourage explicit use of reasoning words – ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’.

Notions of scaffolding also surface in Alexander’s work. The principles of dialogic teaching that relate to the conduct and ethos of classroom talk (collectivity, reciprocity and support) might be regarded as prompts for creating contexts in which children feel able to explain and test their understandings without fear of ridicule or failure and in the knowledge that their ideas will be taken seriously. In this way the processes of coming to know are ’scaffolded’ by the affective context. At another level, Alexander’s insistence that dialogue is understood as part of a wider conceptual framework of pedagogy, reminds teachers of the way in which opportunities to learn are enhanced or constrained by the nature of the activities and discourses in which children engage (2008a, p96), points returned to later in this review.

Finally, however, researchers such as Wood (1988, 1998 and with Bruner and Ross in 1976), Wertsch (1991, and with Addison Stone in 1985) and Bruner (1986) are interested in the processes through which knowledge is built and taken-up by individuals at the micro-level of interaction between teachers and students. At this moment of interplay ‘differences in how something is said, and even when, can be matters of only temporary adjustment, or they can seriously impair effective teaching and accurate evaluation’ (Cazden, 2001, p3). What teachers say and do next is vital.

Wolfe (2006) sought to reveal the meanings of greatest intrinsic value to teachers and their students through examination of the discursive action mediating classroom activities. One outcome of this research was development of a list of strategies through which educationally productive spells of dialogue appeared to be triggered – the ‘how’ of interaction at a micro level perhaps? These include:

teachers

• asking authentic questions
• using deferring questions to check children’s meanings
• pausing to allow children time to i) think and ii) interject and express ideas fully
• adopting a low modality, using words such as ‘perhaps’ and ‘might’ as invitation to a range of possible actions
• offering new content relevant to the theme unfolding
• developing a line of argument by staying with one child through a sequence of connected questions
• accepting responses without evaluating them
• engineering opportunities for students to participate actively in the discourses
• building on children’s interests

and students

• asking questions and making statements.

Grounded in empirical data, these mechanisms resonate with existing indicators of dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2008b) and it would be tempting to view both as solutions to the challenge of teaching through dialogue. However, they presuppose the existence of at least some of the following features of classroom life:

• Teachers structure learning and facilitate children’s active participation in the learning discourses. Cross-curricular links are exploited

• Teachers have sound knowledge of curriculum content and understanding of the issues likely to confuse or challenge children’s thinking

• Teachers’ questions suit the instructional purpose. Some invoke a range of responses and encourage divergent thinking, others require single word responses. In the chaining of question and answers ideas are developed or modified

• Teachers encourage language production and learning talk through activities that require children to respond in extended utterances. They model language that is comprehensible and/or exceeds what learners are able to produce alone

• Teachers listen and respond to the content of students’ utterances, challenging, probing and extending their meanings

• Children are offered constructive and formative feedback on performance

• Visual materials and curriculum resources are selected with care and teachers understand how artifacts i) reflect cultural meanings and ii) mediate learning

• Parties to the discourse live with provisionality and uncertainty

• Turns and speaking rights are evenly distributed. Children initiate in dialogue and at times the teacher withdraws from the floor

• Students are expected to address the public forum in an intelligible and articulate manner and to listen to the substance of each other’s contributions.

These criteria are distilled from naturalistic data gathered in primary and early years’ classrooms in four schools in one local authority in England over three years. Two of the schools were community schools under measures to improve; the third was a Church of England school located in a small village, and the fourth a Sure Start nursery serving a large urban community. Despite the variety of contexts, there appeared to be a particular distinctiveness about practices in the whole-class settings in which dialogic ‘episodes’ were observed (Wolfe, 2006, pp258-259).

Yet despite the wealth of research pointing to the way in which contexts and discourses scaffold children’s learning, there appears to have been little co-ordinated response in the UK to the challenge of scaffolding teachers’ understandings of classroom talk, perhaps because it runs counter to the current preoccupation with ‘raising standards’. When literacy co-ordinators gathered with consultants in one local authority in 2004 to consider implications for practice of Speaking, Listening and Learning materials introduced in 2003 (QCA/DfES, 2003), attendees were inducted into techniques intended to promote children’s communicative skills and informed about drama groups and museum projects. There was little mention of the role of talk for learning generally and few references to the most powerful latent resource at the disposal of schools, the teachers themselves (Wolfe, 2006, p69). Although there are notable exceptions in North Yorkshire, London and elsewhere in the UK, without the understanding and long-term commitment of key players in the system, comprehensive and sustained change at institutional level is difficult to effect. It requires shared values and a strong sense of purpose or vision for the future, factors that apply at every level in the activity structure.

Purpose

Consideration of purpose is clearly important for teachers who want to promote certain kinds of talk in the classroom and spills out at the level of lesson and curriculum unit. In his overview of past research into children’s collaborative learning in classrooms, Mercer (1995) alludes to the importance of selecting activities (in his case, a particular computer program) that ‘require’, rather than merely encourage, sharing of information and joint decision-making. These sentiments are echoed in the work of Gibbons (2002) in the field of second language learning. She suggests ‘the best pedagogic tasks involve some kind of information gap – that is a situation whereby different members within a group, or individuals in a pair hold different or incomplete information, so that the only way that the task can be completed is for this information to be shared’ (2002, pp23-24).

Many primary teachers in England are beginning to create such opportunities by experimenting with different approaches to instruction. Mantle of the Expert (MoE) was devised by education and drama practitioner Dorothy Heathcote (Bolton and Heathcote, 1995). It requires students and their teacher to devise an authentic situation of enquiry in which they act collectively as experts for Heathcote understood the need for a pedagogy that captivates children’s interests and enhances deep level thinking. Other schools have begun to adopt the International Primary Curriculum which promotes integrated learning with an international perspective and emphasis on development of knowledge, skills and dispositions that will equip children ‘to be good citizens and to respond to the changing contexts of their future lives’ (http://www.internationalprimarycurriculum.com/) principles that resonate with Alexander’s (2006) concerns about the broader purposes of education. Yet, despite promotion of the skills required for lifelong learning, there remains an expectation that children should acquire ‘knowledge, skills and understanding of a broad range of curriculum subjects’. This returns us to consideration of the challenge facing teachers who seek to combine dialogic pedagogies with effective subject teaching.

One of the key challenges for subject teachers especially lies in knowing how to match pedagogical form and content at different stages of instruction (Alexander, 2004; Cazden, 2005). This can again be framed as a question of purpose – dialogue and argumentation are not a panacea for everything but they are effective when used selectively and with clear pedagogic intent. Three decades after Barnes (1976) first addressed these matters, Cazden suggested there was ‘too little research showing which educational objectives require more dialogic forms of discourse, and which do not’ (2005). Nevertheless, in recent years there have been encouraging developments from the work of researchers in eg mathematics (eg Solomon, 1998, 2008) and science education (eg Mortimer and Scott, 2003; Scott et al 2006) and in the contexts of computer mediated learning (eg Ravenscroft and McAlister, 2008 in the domains of science, technology and psychology).

Ultimately however, as suggested earlier, a dialogic perspective locates classroom talk in the context of wider institutional, historical and national/international conversations and raises central questions about aims, values and curriculum. We have seen already how in a culture of compliance, advisers at local authority level can impose their version of curriculum matters on groups of teachers through their use of language, what they choose to include and the tone and manner in which ideas are communicated. Nevertheless, the pull towards a discourse that ‘permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual transitions, no spontaneously creative stylising variants on it’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p343) is weakening as policy makers and educators respond to new priorities and imperatives.

Directions and possible futures

The logic of ‘dialogue’ in which knowledge is treated as a temporary fixing of ideas constructed through the interplay of different voices, ensures that classroom communication cannot be separated from consideration of pedagogy and its ‘attendant discourse … what one needs to know, and the skills one needs to command, in order to make and justify the many different kinds of decisions of which teaching is constituted’ (Alexander, 2004b, p11). However, the challenge for all those promoting dialogic pedagogies lies in the power of these divergent ideas to disrupt ideologies which demand conformity to a central authority and are shored up by authoritative paraphernalia – bodies of knowledge and personnel included. How much greater is the task when governments and their agents focus on raising standards by monitoring and testing the performance of children and teachers against a set of predetermined criteria.

Paradoxically, of course, a culture of compliance can actually undermine the very goals that governments set out to achieve. This review has referred to research that demonstrates how the Literacy and Numeracy strategies (DfEE 1998 and DfEE, 1999) appear to have been counter-productive in terms of promoting higher quality classroom interactions in primary schools in England. These issues are mirrored throughout the system. For instance, there is an apparent tension between the knowledge and understandings required to teach effectively in particular subjects and what trainees in teacher education need to know and do to pass skills tests in Literacy, Numeracy and ICT required by the Training and Development Agency. These tests are high-stakes: measures of the success of a particular course on which the ratings of a university department or institution depend; thus tutors and administrators alike are drawn towards these centralizing forces.

Human action – including verbal action – adapts and adjusts to influences from outside but is also changed from within by the discourses permeating and shaping activities, or so it seems. It also seems unlikely that dialogic pedagogies will root deeply in education under the New Labour government unless there is alignment between goals and values at every level of the activity structure or development of a critical mass of influences likely to upend the status quo. Promisingly, this review has drawn attention to the seeding of new ideas and practices and it is valuable to examine these further for their potential to disrupt the current discourse of compliance.

Changing practices and roles

In this review we have seen how promotion of ‘exploratory talk’ ‘dialogue’ or ‘argumentation’ as forms of discourse can encourage teachers and teacher educators to focus on the mechanisms through which these forms of interaction are elicited and sustained and the conditions in which they thrive (Alexander, 2008b, p52). Attention has also been drawn to the importance of selecting topics or texts that ‘facilitate the students’ efforts to adopt a critical stance’ (Wilson and Laman, 2007). Given the advent of new technologies this applies also to the choice of ‘digital tools’ (Ravenscroft and McAlister, 2008) – the software and programmes that represent alternative ‘text types’ and offer new possibilities for supporting development of argumentation and dialogic discourses.

There is also a growing interest in schools in the use of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) to stimulate thinking and productive classroom dialogue through creation of ’shared dialogic spaces’ (Wegerif, 2007) in which students might work effectively with structured guidance both on and off the whiteboard. Researchers at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, led by Mercer, are currently involved in an ESRC funded project focusing on the potential of IWBs to support children’s collaborative learning (IWBs and collaborative pupil learning in primary science: RG49888, 2007-2008). Given Alexander’s insistence that dialogue is understood as part of a wider conceptual framework of pedagogy, it is interesting that another project led by Sara Hennessy is set to explore the orchestration of classroom dialogue incorporating use of the interactive whiteboard (ESRC Research Fellowship: Bridging practice and research into teaching and learning with technology RES-063-27-0081, 2007-2009).

Role play and drama also offer ’spaces’ for dialogic interactions but of a different kind. They afford teachers and students opportunities to subvert traditional classroom roles and relationships temporarily, thereby reducing the risks involved in passing control of learning to the children themselves. However, teachers are required to work in quite different ways from within the learning community, perhaps as co-participants in authentic acts of inquiry or as ‘discourse guides’, facilitating children’s understanding of ways of thinking and modes of operating associated with a subject domain of discipline. This is particularly challenging for ‘[i]t requires a conceptual map of what is to be taught, the ability to think laterally within and beyond that map, and an appreciation of where children are ‘at’ cognitively and what kind of intervention will scaffold their thinking from present to desired understanding’ (Alexander, 2008b p50). Location of much of the research into subject teaching and dialogue at secondary level is significant for whilst most secondary teachers are subject specialists, primary teachers – in England at least – tend to be generalists. For them the challenge of mastering pedagogic content knowledge in all subjects is daunting and raises questions about educational priorities and values. Should primary aged children be taught in lessons organised around subjects, or projects organised around themes and promoting generic communication and reasoning skills? If the latter, then how might learning be effectively tracked in a regime concerned with testing measurable objectives?

There is another kind of ’space’ that remains to be exploited for its dialogic potential, which occurs in the interaction between children’s home and school lives. At one Children’s Centre in the South of England, practitioners promote learning driven by children’s choices and prior experiences. The programme of ‘Continuous and Enhanced Provision’ aims to support development of good practice in early years’ settings (http://www.earlyexcellence.com/). Its success relies on a co-ordinated network of care professionals, teachers and key-workers, who get to know children and liaise closely with their families. Information flows back and forth between home and school, and children’s progress is mapped in ‘learning diaries’ organised around the areas for learning and development identified in the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum, a model perhaps for effective assessment of cross-curricular activities at other stages of education.

These examples are encouraging but are they enough? Throughout this review, it has been suggested that discourse needs to be considered within contexts of classroom communication and pedagogy and ultimately debates about values and culture. One of the hurdles to transformation lies in the nature of our subject. Classroom talk is ephemeral: unlike the printed word it cannot easily be held up for study by others. Nevertheless access to quality transcriptions of classroom discourse and/or video footage would support the development of all those interested in educating children for tomorrow’s world and there are some fruitful advances. Examples of classroom discourse are increasingly available for all those interested in understanding the role of communication in pedagogic processes. These include Alexander’s (2001) cross-cultural study, Torrance and Pryor’s (1998) book about formative assessment and a forthcoming book of case studies from nine countries across the world (Barnard and Torres-Guzman, 2008). There are also changing models of professional development that augur well for the transformation of discourses at school and classroom level.

In a project under way in secondary schools in the East of England more than 100 teachers are involved in an inquiry set up to critique aspects of their own practice. Their current goal is to explore through video, the challenges of adopting a dialogic pedagogy at a stage of education in which subject teaching is promoted in initial teacher education and CPD courses. The network operates through dialogic principles that resonate with an innovative teacher induction programme offered by the University of Missouri-Columbia in the USA. That programme rests on a view of professional development in which ‘universities do not provide the knowledge to teachers nor do teachers rely on only their pragmatic knowledge of teaching. Instead teachers work to create knowledge from their own experiences’, a process that ‘often occurs through collaboration, inquiry and mentorship’ (Gilles and Wilson, 2004, p88).

Pedagogical initiatives

Curricular initiatives in recent years are perhaps indicative of a ‘growing belief that the quality of classroom talk is profoundly important and that its character and context need somehow to be transformed’ (Alexander, 2008a, p17). Renewal of the Primary and Secondary frameworks (2007) have placed talk centre stage in Literacy and English teaching, and skills of enquiry, participation, communication and ‘responsible action’ are central to the KS3/4 Citizenship Programme of Study (1999). The most pertinent changes relate to reform of assessment procedures (eg Black and Wiliam, 1998; Black et al 2002). Assessment for Learning (AfL) requires that teachers attend to the quality of classroom dialogue for it is this that creates opportunities for discovering what children know and helping them become better learners, a crucial platform for personalising learning (Hargreaves, 2004). Indeed, in summing up, we might select the prophetic words of David Miliband in which he specified the components of personalised learning. He began by proposing that ‘[a] personalised offer in education depends on really knowing the strengths and weaknesses of individual students’ and continued ‘the biggest driver for change is assessment for learning and the use of data and dialogue to diagnose every student’s learning needs’ (2004, p4).

The AfL Strategy (2008) is a promising indicator of changing times. Nevertheless, as one commentator notes, the emphasis on ‘testing’ and ‘making accurate assessments linked to National Curriculum levels’ sidelines relational, pedagogic and pupil responsibility aspects of AfL, the very features associated with dialogic practices. It seems that the challenge of turning rhetoric into practice remains, but can we ignore it any longer? Where once a school’s task of transmitting values was relatively clear, now ‘the same schools are expected to respond coherently to ethnic and cultural diversity, moral relativism and the loss of individual and collective identity’ (Alexander, 2006, p6). There is not only strong pedagogical justification but also clear moral imperative for helping children develop the skills and competences needed to participate effectively in a world beset by problems that require mutual understanding and collective problem-solving. Argumentation and dialogue are not simply alternative patterns of communication; they are principled approaches to pedagogy, as Alexander’s model of Dialogic Teaching suggests. The power to change thinking though changing classroom practices and communication should not be ignored.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

During the last part of the 20^th century and early part of the 21^st, creativity has been seen to be increasingly significant in education, within cultural policy discussions, starting with the landmark advice of the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE, 1999). Convened by Sir Ken Robinson, NACCCE synthesised empirical evidence from researchers such as Woods and Jeffrey (1996), Craft (1997), and Harland et al (1998) who, during the 1990s, had distinguished between creative teaching (ie creativity in pedagogy) and teaching for creativity (with a focus on the development of creativity in the learner). The key findings from this work were that ‘creative learning’ involves children experiencing innovation in the classroom, control over activities and their evolution, together with a sense of relevance and ownership in their learning – and that these four features are also characteristics of creative teaching (Jeffrey and Woods, 2003).

NACCCE recommended the development of guidance on creative teaching and learning. This led to a number of years of work by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to develop such non-statutory guidance, based on a four year development and research process across the curriculum, across the 4-16 span, and in a large number of schools (QCA, 2005, 2008a, 2008b). From this non-statutory guidance has flowed multiple innovations in curriculum, learning and pedagogy within, and beyond schools, all of which are informed to differing degrees by the definition of creativity given in the NACCCE Report, and the way that it was framed in relation to culture and as a democratic concept. NACCCE saw creativity as ‘imaginative activity, fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are original and of value’ (NACCCE, 1999, p29).The democratic approach adopted, together with the linking of creativity with culture, represented significant shifts away from a view of creativity as only attainable by the gifted, and toward a view of learning as empowerment in and beyond the classroom (for example, Jeffrey and Craft, 2001; Sefton-Green, 2008).

From 2002, the notion of ‘creative learning’ was given added momentum by the establishment of Creative Partnerships – another of NACCCE’s recommendations. Creative Partnerships has promoted creative learning as an agenda, seeking to foster imaginative, inventive thinking and engagement through active, meaningful learning, across the curriculum; often involving, but not always restricted to, the arts. As will be discussed later, whilst the term ‘creative learning’ has proved to be problematic (Craft, 2005; Cochrane et al, 2008), it nevertheless remains in currency, seeking to highlight strategies and approaches to engage children and young people in stimulating, meaningful learning, developing generative and transformative dispositions and behaviours (Sefton-Green, 2008). Such strategies and approaches are harnessed so as to address a concern with student disengagement as one of the challenges for education identified as Europe-wide (Kendall and Kinder, 2005).

Creativity as a means of navigation?

In response to the backdrop of rapid social, economic, technological, spiritual and environmental change, creativity is frequently framed as having an ameliorating role to play in the classroom, through which to weather the multiple storms and in which to ride the waves of policy affordances for creativity.

A feature of the way in which creativity has been interpreted and adopted with and in schools is the expansive ‘use-map’ of approaches and values that it in practice encompasses, which as Banaji, Burn and Buckingham (2006) note, results in at least nine distinctive discourses being in currency at the present time in respect of creativity in education. Banaji et al (ibid) characterise these as:

Creative genius rhetoric – rooted in the European Enlightenment, this post-Romantic perspective emphasizes extraordinary creativity in a range of domains

Democratic and political rhetoric – rooted in the Romantic era this perspective sees creativity as offering empowerment

The notion of creativity as ubiquitous – which sees creativity as pervasive

Creativity as a social good – emphasizing inclusion, multiculturalism, and creativity seen as necessary to ‘a good life’

Rhetoric which emphasizes the economic imperative – drawing on neo-liberal discourse around the economic programme

Approaches emphasizing play – with roots again in Romantic thought, this perspective sees childhood play as the origin of adult creative thought

Approaches focusing on creativity and cognition – stemming from 20^th century Piagetian and Vygotskian work, emphasizes cognitive processing

A discourse around creativity and new technologies – which emphasise the affordances of these in relation to creativity

The creative classroom – this discourse in particular draws connections between individual and collective creativity in the classroom, relating knowledge, skills and pedagogy to what it is to be creatively human.

What is notable is the breadth of these discourses, which span on the one hand those emphasising exclusivity and competition, and the capacity to thrive in and contribute to a capitalist market economy, and at the other end of the spectrum, inclusion, democratisation and empowerment. The discourses reflect public policies and teaching and learning practices, as well as commentary on the role of creativity in education. The potential tensions in evidence across the spectrum of discourses can be seen as mirroring a key tension between discourses of, on the one hand, standards and on the other, creativity (Craft and Jeffrey, 2008) evident in education more generally. The powerful drive to raise standards and to make performative judgements about individuals and about schools, can be seen as being in tension with an almost equally powerful commitment to nurturing ingenuity, flexibility, capability in generative engagement (ie in creative behaviours). Researchers have demonstrated this in relation to younger learners (Troman, 2008), secondary aged learners (Nicholl and McLellan,2008), those in post-compulsory education (Simmons and Thompson, 2008), and in higher education (Clouder et al, 2008; McWilliam and Haukka, 2008).

Creativity as enabling a personalised journey or voyage

Concentrating on the aspect of the policy climate which focuses on creativity, the two most recent curriculum policy manifestations of creativity implemented from September 2008 in early years settings and Key Stage 3 (DCSF, 2008), are the Early Years Foundation Stage (DfES, 2007; DCSF, 2008) which continues to emphasise the significance and reach of creativity, and the Key Stage 3 curriculum which includes a framework of personal, learning and thinking skills (PLTS) that it encompasses. Each in turn offer teachers a means of personalising learning and thus to encourage student engagement, or ‘deep learning’ (Hargreaves, 2008).

Creativity, in these two most recent curriculum frameworks, is positioned as ‘ubiquitous’, and as ‘universalized’ in terms of who is capable of developing it and in terms of its location in relation to domains of knowledge. The message seems to be that creativity is for everyone and is everywhere, and that creativity enables engagement in personal trajectories, and (consequently) ‘effective learning’ – itself a problematic concept in relation to creativity (Craft, 2005).

The wash of the tide and the pull of currents

As the tide has washed creativity back into focus, commentators have suggested (Craft and Jeffrey, 2008) that there are three ‘drivers’ of this shift in emphasis, through which the currents of movement and development can perhaps be detected.

Firstly, the ‘democratic’ view which emerged toward the end of the 20^th century saw creativity as inherent in human behaviour as an everyday capability (NACCCE, 1999), life-wide and also domain-wide, and necessary (Craft, 2005). This discourse contrasted with the earlier interest in ‘high c’ creativity (Craft, 2001) in valuing ‘everyday’, or ‘little c’ creativity, and separating this from a specific domain context.

Secondly, explicit connections were made by Government between creativity in the classroom and the economy, for example in an initial positioning document (DCMS, 2001) and then a creative economy strategy document (DCMS et al, 2008) reflecting a view of labour as involving creativity (Buckingham and Jones, 2001).

Thirdly, following the NACCCE elision of creative and cultural development and prompted by a second paper, Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years (DCMS, 2001), Government funded a large-scale programme of curriculum development, Creative Partnerships, which invested in education projects involving community artists of all types to both generate creative learners and cultural cohesion. This has been extended in England to a five-hour a week ‘Cultural Offer’ (DCSF, 2008) which is to encourage young people’s participation as producers of, participants in and spectators of culture to be overseen by a Youth Culture Trust (Creative Partnerships, 2008) enabling young people, through partnership, to ‘find their talent’. This policy presaged the re-framing of the Creative Partnerships programme as one focusing on ‘cultural learning’ (McMaster, 2008). The conflation of creativity with culture in education is exemplified by a recent government report: Nurturing Creativity in Young People (DCMS, 2006a) and the Government’s response to this (DCMS, 2006b). The mixed creative and cultural programme recommended by Roberts was also reflected in the findings of a subsequent Parliamentary Select Committee (2007) and taken forward by Government (House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee, 2008).

These three drivers bring with them currents that have the potential to erode and reshape the performative, standards-orientated landscape to one which offers a more significant place to a concern with how, where and what is learned (Gardner et al, 2008).

Investigating creativity: deep underpinning currents

Whilst the currents of empowerment and of powerful connections between creativity and culture are awash, there are significant challenges inherent in the tumult of possibilities for framing and developing creativity in schools and beyond. These arise from what are sometimes irreconcilable underpinning discourses (the deep currents) that influence the way in which creativity is constructed in practice in the classroom. Research and development in creativity reflects a range of perspectives drawn from:

• specific epistemological and ontological positions informing enquiry (there is a huge diversity in approaches from those exploring creativity from a positivist perspective using quantitative methodological approaches, to those rooted in the interpretive tradition adopting qualitative approaches to enquiry – the two positions are irreconcilable in that one sees knowledge as ‘objective’ and the other as ‘interpreted’ or ’situated’)
• the discipline of the field of enquiry (for example, psychology, sociology, economics, the arts, philosophy, cultural studies; whilst psychology has dominated much of the work on creativity in the past, the ascendance of social psychological, sociological and cultural studies-informed approaches is notable – and each discipline brings with it not only dominant epistemological and ontological norms which affect the culture of the discipline and of enquiry in it, but also differing foci and interests)
• the focus of the enquiry (for example, a focus on the economy, on employment, on inclusion, on ‘development’, on ’sustainability’; as Banaji et al illustrate in their analysis discussed above, there are multiple foci evident in the focus of discourses of creativity – some of which may be mutually exclusive)
• the cultural context in which the research occurs (much of the most influential work on creativity has been undertaken in a Western context and yet there is some inter-cultural work which demonstrates distinctive differences between cultural approaches to creativity).

The powerful reach of creativity research by North American (mainly) quantitative psychologists, during the mid 20^th century in particular, now co-exists alongside an increasingly interdisciplinary, qualitative/mixed-methods approach to studying creativity, in broader cultural contexts in Europe, South America, the Far East and Middle East. The influences of social anthropology and social psychology are apparent in research questions and sites and methodologies. Enquiry foci in part reflect the disciplinary context of the work, but also broader cultural values around what creativity ‘is for’, spanning, for example, ‘personal development/expression’ to ‘personal survival’ to ‘economic development’ or ‘global survival’.

These background influences on, or deep currents in, creativity in education frame pragmatic initiatives. Examples of such initiatives in England include the framing of ‘Creativity and Critical Thinking’ as an aspect of learning and development, and Creative Development as an area of learning within the Early Years Foundation Stage (for children from 0-5) and of ‘Creative Thinkers’ within Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills in the KS3 curriculum (for 11-14 year olds), both implemented from September 2008. Other initiatives, again in England, would include national large scale projects which tend to focus on creative partnership, discussed below. Each pragmatic initiative reflects a unique set of perspectives on epistemology/ontology, discipline, focus and culture, affecting, for example, the extent to which creativity is understood as an individualised or a collective process, the extent to which creativity is seen as a domain-specific or as a generalised process, the emphasis laid on process and product, the extent to which the arts and culture are seen as core to it, the extent to which assessment of creativity is seen as desirable or possible.

Emergent from the interpretivist perspective on knowledge, a powerful draw on the arts and cultural studies, an engagement/empowerment focus and the Western cultural context, in England we have seen, during the early years of the 21^st century, the identification of a significant role for creative partnership, documented by a number of researchers (eg Griffiths and Woolf, 2008; Jeffery, 2005; Hall et al, 2007; Galton, 2008; Pringle, 2008). A feature of the work on partnership is the emphasis on adults with different disciplinary backgrounds working together – and also adults other than teachers working with children and young people to nurture their creativity.

Journeying in partnership?

Working with those who have expertise from beyond the school to nurture the creativity of children and young people has been a feature of much creativity work in schools, especially (although not exclusively) that developed through Creative Partnerships as an initiative.

Whilst there is a long history of adults other than teachers working in schools, the nature of this engagement seems to be distinctive with a focus on an apprenticeship-based pedagogy (Griffiths and Woolf, 2008). Those working to understand how partnership works in practice often draw on socio-cultural ideas around the development of a community of practice (Wenger, 2005) and the notion of apprenticeship developed by Lave and Wenger (1991), in which the novice is introduced by the expert to the practices of the domain in ways that encourage control and ownership by the child; a scaffolded approach which results in the novice gaining expertise in know-how as well as the propositional knowledge needed to become more proficient in the task in question (eg Dillon et al, 2007).

The distinctiveness of pedagogies adopted by teachers and creative partners is increasingly evident (eg Hall et al, 2007; Galton, 2008; Pringle, 2008). Each of these studies highlights the tendency for creative partners to adopt a co-constructive, co-participative pedagogy, working alongside students to support the realisation of their ideas, acting as coach and facilitator compared with teachers’ practices being more oriented toward the acquisition of propositional knowledge, the maintenance of discipline and driven by assessment-orientated outcomes. There is some evidence that students’ perceptions of teachers’ pedagogy is more negative than their perception of the pedagogy of creative partners (Galton, 2008). From his small-scale mixed-method study into eleven partnerships in six schools (three secondary and three primary, in three Creative Partnerships regions), Galton (ibid) notes that the approach of the creative partner tended more toward ‘guided discovery’ than ‘cued elicitation’ (Galton, 2008, page x).

Whilst it is argued by others that this polarization is not conceptually necessary (eg Jeffery, 2005; Chappell et al, 2008), the distinction remains live in classrooms and raises challenging questions regarding future educational provision in relation to the models of learning and pedagogy which underpin them. Especially evident in creative partnership is the construction of meaning by the less experienced alongside the expert practitioner; a model of what Bruner (1986) called ’scaffolded’ learning through modelling, cueing and challenging. Bruner emphasised that these processes can be developed in peer-to-peer learning where one student is more able than the other in a particular area, and is sufficiently skilled socially to support the learning of a less skilled peer.

The extent to which such constructivist creative partnership is also evident in other inter-generational learning, both within and beyond schools, may also need further investigation. This is particularly important as learning ‘outside of the classroom’ increases in significance. Evaluation, for example, of the NESTA-funded programme, Ignite! which worked with highly creative students aged 10-15 outside of the classroom using such inter-generational enagement through partnership within immersive laboratory-style exploration, found the programme to be particularly effective at nurturing generative thinking and, with it, self-esteem (Craft et al, 2004). In particular, the study noted that “The interactions between adults and the young people were of a high quality. They often gave young people decision making authority so that the control was theirs” (Craft et al, 2004, p10). This study, however, which also researched the impact of the Ignite! programme for 16-21 year olds, also documented some of the challenges faced by young people in negotiating the boundaries of school/college and out-of-school activity, highlighting the need for much greater permeability between the two. This is one of the foci of the recently published ‘Even Better Children’s Plan’ by the Common Threads Alliance (2008), and whilst there has been a great deal of policy and practice development in terms of creativity in education, at policy level this is less visible outside of the classroom; an area which, in the context of considering greater flexibility in educational processes, needs re-visiting. The work of organisations such as Antidote, the Bristol Education Initative, Eastfeast, 5×5x5, Humanscale Education, Ignite!, Performing Arts Lab (PAL), Personalised Education Now (PEN), The Potential Trust, Red Balloon Learner Centres, Schome and the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship all contribute to alternative visions for education which emphasise intergenerational and peer-to-peer learning through pedagogies which enable adults to act as ‘lead learners’ (Common Threads Alliance, 2008). The considerable contributions made to the fostering of creativity in learning outside the classroom by cultural and arts venues as well as field sites for residential and day experiences need closer interrogation with a particular focus on pedagogic practices and the student experience.

Tensions and dilemmas en voyage

A number of tensions and dilemmas arise from the incommensurate mix of underpinning perspectives that inform on creativity in education, of which six dilemmas, are discussed briefly here. Each has practical implications for teaching and learning, and for exploring beyond current horizons.

Recognising sites of creativity: Whilst some argue creativity can be understood as a ‘transferable skill’ across domains (Woods and Jeffrey, 1996; Mardell et al, 2008), others argue that creativity cannot be understood without reference to the specific disciplinary area in which it occurs whether this be within or beyond schools (Amabile, 1990; Chappell, 2006, 2007; Csizsentmihalyi, 1999; Gardner, 1993; Miell and Littleton, 2008; Vass, 2004; Wallace and Gruber, 1989). Still others argue that the creative impulse is identical across domains, in that it ultimately involves Possibility Thinking (Craft, 2000, 2001, 2002) – the transformation from ‘what is’ to ‘what might be’ through asking ‘what if?’ in appropriate ways (Craft, 2001; Burnard et al, 2006; Chappell et al, 2008; Cremin et al, 2006). Possibility Thinking, it is argued (Craft, in press) is at the heart of all creative engagement and the contention is that whilst the manifestation of creativity is diverse according to the domain of application (Clack, 2008; Craft, Cremin, Burnard, Chappell, 2007; Craft, Chappell, Cremin, Burnard and Dragovic, 2008; Jeffrey and Craft, 2006) the at-heart impulse is the same. The studies undertaken by this team in educational contexts from the early years through to secondary, suggest that the concept of Possibility Thinking has traction in creative engagement across contexts; it also demonstrates that in specific domains (those studied so far are mathematics and dance), Possibility Thinking manifests distinctively. The tension made visible on this continuum, between the disciplinary-root and the generalizable view, is therefore a complex one. It is important, as far as nurturing creativity within and beyond the classroom is concerned, to be clear about how sites of creativity are viewed. For some, the tension between disciplinary focus and creativity as generalized, is incommensurable.

Defining creative learning: the emergence of the term ‘creative learning’ from a meld of discourses, and in particular the harnessing of this term to creativity in the context of ‘partnership’ and more recently the context of ‘cultural development’, has produced serious challenges. These include trying to understand in practice what creative learning is, and how it differs from ‘effective learning’ (Cochrane et al, 2008; Craft, 2005; Craft et al, 2006; Craft, Cremin and Burnard, 2008; Jeffrey and Craft, 2004; Sefton-Green, 2008; Moran, 2008). This ongoing debate has resulted in agreement that creative learning is not a distinctive process in itself, being so close to meaning-making as defined in a constructivist view of learning and being seemingly confused in recent policy initiatives such as the recent consultation undertaken by Tate and Creative Partnerships (2008) resulting in a children’s Manifesto for a Creative Britain. The continued use of the term ‘creative learning’ as far as schools and other sites of learning, may be unhelpful, although the distinction between creative teaching and teaching for creativity appears to remain a useful one (Jeffrey and Craft, 2004).

Implications of adopting a ubiquitous, marketized view of creativity: the view of creativity which accepts without question economic development as a driver, is at the least questionable, in the assumption that more and new is better than re-use, mend and adapt, and in the ‘throw away’ culture that contributes to environmental degradation and the over-use of resource, together with a social, spiritual and cultural cost (Craft, 2005, 2008b). For a marketized view of creativity with its emphasis on individuality, consumption, acquisition, competiveness and success in a global marketplace forces the disappearance from view of alternative approaches which emphasise sustainability, spirituality, co-operation and understanding. Such blindness could be seen as foolhardy at a critical point in the environmental and social trajectory of the earth in terms of its resources and the exponential demand on those through population growth, and in the development of fundamentalist opposition to this model. The global financial collapse experienced in the Autumn of 2008 could be seen as a trigger for a re-evaluation of such highly market-orientated values and yet, this marketized view of creativity and its functions, remains one of the most powerful underpinning discourses as far as creativity in schools and beyond is concerned. The implications for education are far-reaching, when the dominant rationale is one which does not encourage students to question this direction of travel and implies a view of education as serving the status quo rather than encouraging independence of judgement to pro-social ends at this scale. The need for wise creativity (Claxton et al, 2008), ie creativity that pays attention to the ends as well as the means, and for education to nurture students who feel some stewardship of wise creativity, is lost in a ubiquitous, marketized discourse.

The challenge of relating creativity to wisdom and trusteeship (Craft, Claxton and Gardner, 2008). As indicated above, considering the purposes to which creativity is put, and where responsibility might lie both within and beyond the classroom, for the wise exercise of creativity, brings a moral and ethical dimension to an otherwise amoral hallmark of human endeavour, and recognises that creativity is not necessarily all positive. In a world of rapid change in scientific, technological, social, spiritual, economic and environmental terms, and in which futures are therefore plural and uncertain, it seems particularly important to bring an ethical lens to creative endeavour, and for this to be part of what education addresses. Clearly to include consideration of ends in the process of creativity places possible constraints on an otherwise open and unbounded process, in raising questions about what is valued and what is rejected. And yet, as Claxton (2008), Gardner (2008), Craft (2008c) and co-authors argue, without wisdom (which seeks to recognise complex and competing values driving creativity) and without a collective perspective (in which is the development of shared goals), the value of creativity in education may be questionable.

The role of the collective, and the significance of personal engagement: increasing recognition of the role of the social context to learning and the extent to which creativity can never be seen as anything other than collective and collaborative, sheds a new light on creativity in schools and beyond. Recent studies of creativity in education have attempted to explore creativity in relationship (eg Chappell et al, 2008) recognising that whether it simultaneous or not creators rely on what has gone before, to build on, to reject or to adapt, and thus creativity is developed in relationship with others (John-Steiner, 2000). Such studies call for increasingly means of exploring and developing creativity which encompass cognitive, social, emotional and, to a degree spiritual, dimensions of creativity, acknowledging ‘co-construction’ as new consciousness (eg Rojas-Drummond et al, in press). These studies contrast with the 20th-century North American tendency toward individualisation and measurement. Such themes are developed in a multi-disciplinary collection of papers (Littleton et al, in press) united by a view of creativity as situated in social and cultural context and as manifest in relationships, interactions, culture and cultural artefacts. As a collection they offer analysis and reflection on collaborative creativity in educational settings.

The challenge of documenting and supporting progression in creativity The documentation and assessment of creativity in education depends on the extent to which each or both of process and product are valued (Cochrane and Cockett, 2007), as well as the extent to which creativity is understood as context-free or domain-situated, individualised or a collective endeavour (Craft, 2008c). The formal curriculum appears to value creativity as both a context-free and domain-situated phenomenon which leaves practitioners with the challenge of what to focus on and how to represent ‘progression’, and the focus on individual creative achievement eclipses to a degree how collective and collaborative creativity may be valued. In addition, the continued dominance in practice of subjects (as opposed to the personal, learning and thinking skills) in the curriculum for key stage 3 (reference needed), together with current proposals for the Primary Curriculum (Rose, 2008 reference needed) means that teachers are unlikely to find it easy to document and support progression in creativity. The influence of teacher stance on how progression is supported has been emphasised (Craft et al, 2007). The same team also identified other influences on approaches to progression in creativity including student stance, the nature of tasks set and the expectations of outcomes produced (Craft et al, 2006). Implicit in exploration of the assessment of creativity in education are also beliefs about what models of assessment may be assumed. In relation to creativity these may range from psychometric, test-based, product-focused approaches (reflecting an epistemological and ontological position that sees knowledge as objectifiable), to componential approaches which value a performance-in-context approach, encompass both creative process and any outcomes (which reflect an epistemological and ontological position that views knowledge as situated). Given the commitment made by Government to developing some kind of creativity portfolio (DCMS, 2006a, 2006b) albeit one which allows each student to compile evidence that can support transition into the creative industries specifically, together with the opportunity that the Rose Review of Primary Education (Rose, 2008) is offering at the time of writing, there is some urgency in navigating clear routes through the tensions in how creativity and assessment are themselves understood and located in curriculum and learning, so that possible educational futures represent conceptually coherent approaches to the question of how creativity is documented and how progression is supported (rather than a purely pragmatic approach).

The challenge of tensions between adult and youth perceptions of realities in childhood and youth given digital and real world contexts. How are the increasingly digital creative and agentive experiences of young people beyond schools perceived by adults and how does this relate to how children and young people experience their lives? The gaps between Generation X (those born before the ‘net revolution’) and ‘Generations Y (those born through the 1980s and 1990s) and Z (those born after around 2002) are increasingly widening. Children and young people may be seen by Generation X commentators as either empowered and effectively moving beyond adult control (Buckingham, 2007; Newburn, 1996) or in contrast, as being at risk (Frechette, 2006) where adults’ roles are to protect. How do such perceptions of digital experience outside school impact on what education might do in relation to nurturing creativity? The interim report of the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum (Rose, 2008) recommends that primary schools may need to teach the ICT curriculum currently aimed at 11-14 year olds in KS3, and to 7-11 year olds, in KS2, but this does not address the question of what sorts of experiences from beyond the classroom may be valued and legitimated.

For the kinds of new digital, increasingly hand-held technologies that play an increasing role in the lives of children and young people, involve gaming, social networking and content generation in a range of communal and geographically wide-ranging digital contexts (often spanning age and generation). A recently published national study in the USA for example (Lenhart et al, 2008), based on data collected in late 2007 and early 2008, shows that 97% of teenagers aged 12-17 (99% boys, 94% girls) play computer, web, console or portable games in a range of genres (86% playing on a console such as a PlayStation, Xbox or Wii, 73% playing on a desktop or laptop computer, 60% playing on portable gaming device such as Nintendo DS, Game Boy, Sony PlayStation Portable, 48% use handheld organizer or mobile phone to play games). This situation is echoed by a study undertaken in England (Withers with Sheldon, 2008) which indicated that four out of five 5-15-year olds have access to the internet at home (and also highlighted a lack of concern for safety, privacy and security among users, any more than children and young people might have concerns in visiting a local playground).

A further study (Ito et al, 2008), again mainly US-focused, indicates that online spaces facilitate young people in connecting with peers in new ways and in constant engagement, through instant messaging, texting and social networking sites. Whilst the majority of youth use the new media to extend existing, usually face-to-face relationships, a smaller number of young people explore beyond their school and community to explore interests and find information which may be more specialised. These may include, for example, creative writing and online gaming which allow them to extend their friendships beyond the local community, and afford opportunities for making their work visible in online audiences offering opportunities for recognition. Ito et al also note that in friendship-orientated and interest-driven activity online, young people extend their technical and media literacy in an environment which is both broad and immediate, through exploration both independently and in relationship with others, offering and seeking feedback on their ideas. Some young people in this way become specialists or ‘geek out’ in an area of interest where expert feedback is sought from peers who share the passion for this talent, and who have proven expertise. Offering powerful and often international communities of interest, whilst adults may participate, they are not necessarily the most expert. The research team thus recognises that in social networking and ‘geeking out’, digital media offer significant opportunities for high motivation, autonomy, self-directed and peer-prompted learning and creative freedom in youth much less apparent in a traditional classroom setting. Perhaps most significantly, goals of learning emerge through iterative exploration and experiment rather than being pre-defined as they are in schools.

Such digital activities are for many young people as natural as engaging face-to-face with peers, and afford exciting and imaginative collaborative and co-participative approaches to creative engagement. How does education respond? A clear view of and aspiration for childhood and youth is clearly fundamental to looking beyond current horizons toward learning, curriculum, pedagogy and frameworks that could nurture creativity in both learners and teachers, given the agency which digital realities offer. Ito et al (2008) note that the peer-based learning which characterise online social networking, gaming and content-generation, not only turns traditional approaches to authority and expertise ‘on their heads’ but are also seen negatively by some adults. There is no doubt that the digital spaces and affordances in the lives of children and young people offer opportunities and challenges for education both in nurturing creativity and in engaging creatively in terms of provision.

Shared journeys, multiple destinations

The ways in which each of these tensions and dilemmas is resolved in principle as well as in practice, will result in distinctive manifestations of creativity in schools and beyond. The palpable need to develop educational futures which address futures-orientation, futures-capability, appropriate integration of technologies, and systemic approaches which enable creative education and education which nurtures creativity, is evident in the work of policy makers (eg the BCH Programme itself, co-ordinated by Futurelab, 2008) commentators (eg Brighouse, 2008; Fielding, 2006, 2007; Rix and Twining, 2007; Sandford and Facer, 2008; Twining, 2003; Twining et al, 2006; Craft, Twining and Chappell, 2008) and some practitioners (RSA Future Schools Network, 2008). But the challenges in looking beyond current horizons demand both commitment and openness, independence of mind and co-participation (Craft et al, 2007) and pose significant demands to visionaries as well as to practitioners.

The challenges which face the educational and wider community demand collective Possibility Thinking in exploring educational futures both in terms of imaginative ways of providing educational opportunities and in terms of multiplicity of possible outcomes. There is high potential for collective envisionment – and in particular for involving children and young people in generating educational futures. Wise collective Possibility Thinking implies in its nature, attention to impact of ideas, and thus nurtures ‘trusteeship’, the stewardship of emergent possibilities (Craft, in press). Yet, the assumptions of complexity and responsibility as conditions of wise creativity (Claxton, 2008) imply the sharing of leadership and vision and the potential for emergent and multiple futures. To this extent, wise collective Possibility Thinking may sit in tension with performative policy making which in many ways can be seen as unchanged in character over the last 30 years or so.

The need both for shared journeys in terms of devising educational futures that include many voices, and for multiple destinations from micro to macro level in predicting and manifesting the goals of educational futures seems undisputed. However, special challenges posed by a focus on creativity, are firstly, the tensions in finding appropriate balance points between structure and freedom in learning, curriculum, pedagogy and systems, and secondly, tensions between ‘managed’ approaches perhaps more typical of Generation X and ‘evolutionary’ ones more typical of the social networking engaged in by Generations Y and Z.

Over the horizon: Creative Educational Futures?

Given the pace of change and the degrees of uncertainty facing us in social, economic, technological, scientific and environmental terms in the early 21^st century, it seems incontrovertible that educational futures need both to be inherently creative and also to enhance the creativity of children and young people – and of the adults who work with them. Educational futures however both reflect and construct the wider societal context and to this degree, the multiple futures that may be constructed or emerge, may reflect a variety of wider scenarios from environmental, health, conflict-based or economic collapse to more positive possibilities.

Whichever suite of possibilities turns out to manifest in practice, there are perhaps four themes that may guide those grappling with educational futures. Reflecting the nature of young people’s lives, and a stance on futuring that acknowledges multiple realities and perspectives, in looking ahead to the next thirty years, learners, teachers, parents and others might seek to explore the following:

- Pluralities: How can educational futures reflect the breadth of places, activities, literacies, ethics and opportunities for play, learning and socialising that currently exist and which seem likely to expand? How can educational futures encompass plurality of belief given the rise of fundamentalism of differing kinds, without producing a new form of fundamentalism (of plurality)?

- Possibilities: how can educational futures reflect multiple possibilities at the level of the classroom and the organisation, in terms of student and teacher choice, access, ways of learning, community and involvement? How can such multiple possibilities co-exist alongside the paradoxes involved in the tensions between originality and the uniformity produced by globalisation?

- Playfulness: How can educational futures support the exploratory drive of children and young people in both actual and virtual spaces, and acknowledge evolutionary change in play-oriented identity associated with non-linear, empowerment-oriented digital space opportunities?

- Participation: How can educational futures acknowledge and engage with the increased participation of children and young people in social and economic spaces as agents as well as objects of change? How can potential educational provision harness, recognise and reward cultural mores that characterise the engagement of children and young people in online spaces which feature democratic playful, dialogic engagement? What responsibilities might education hold for the ways in which children and young people broker paradoxes of reality (real compared with virtual life), and the possible differing views on responsibility, risk, participation and social pressure that may accompany these?

The exploration of educational futures might also pay attention to what extensions to literacies and media do to views of and practices in learning, pedagogy, curriculum and assessment, together with potential tensions between creative and performative views of curriculum, learning and assessment. Educational futures which both manifest and foster creativity are likely to involve systemic transformation, being designed for flexibility, to foster creativity and collaboration, to encourage interaction between varied age groups and to meet learners’ preferences about how, where, when, they learn (Facer, 2007). To what extent those currently engaged in teaching and learning are able, willing and resourced to address wise, creative educational futures, will need careful consideration.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

In recent decades, many OECD member countries have undergone a transformation from an industrial to a knowledge economy (Bell, 1973; Drucker, 1993). The knowledge economy is based on “the production and distribution of knowledge and information, rather than the production and distribution of things” (Drucker, 1993, p182). Knowledge workers manipulate symbols rather than machines, and create conceptual artifacts rather than physical objects (Bereiter, 2002; Drucker, 1993; Reich, 1991). These analysts emphasize the importance of creativity, innovation, and ingenuity in the knowledge economy; some scholars now refer to today’s economy as a creative economy (Florida, 2002; Howkins, 2001).

We are entering an age of innovation, and creativity will grow in importance due to several broad societal and economic trends:

1. Increasingly globalized markets result in greater competitiveness, even for industries that historically had been protected from significant challenge

2. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies result in shorter product development cycles, increasing the pace of innovation and change

3. Increasingly sophisticated information technology is spreading the scope of automation into sectors of the economy that formerly required active human involvement, including increasingly advanced service and knowledge work, thus obsoleting those job categories that do not involve active, daily creativity

4. Global labor market competition has resulted in low-skill, low-creativity jobs moving to extremely low-wage countries such that OECD labor forces can no longer compete

5. Increasing wealth and leisure time in OECD countries (and beyond) have increased the demand for the products of the creative industries. As of 2007, the creative industries represented over 11% of U.S. GDP (Gantchev, 2007).

These trends result in regional, economic, and organizational shifts – such as flexible specialization, regional economies structured around a loose network of small producers, and short product runs – that place creativity at a premium (Jeffcutt and Pratt, 2002, p. 226).

An economic school of thought known as new growth theory argues that creativity and idea generation are central to today’s economy; the driver of economic growth is technological change (Cortright, 2001; Lucas, 1988; Romer, 1990; Solow, 1956, 1994). In this view, knowledge is an intrinsic part of the economic system – a third factor, added to the traditional two of labor and capital (Florida, 2002; Romer, 1990). Peters and Humes (2003) noted that “economic progress and expansion has always depended on new ideas and innovation … What has changed, perhaps, is that knowledge is now recognized as being at least as important as capital (physical and financial)” (p1). New growth theory implies that those nations that thrive will be the ones that succeed at innovation – generating and applying new knowledge.

The creative industries have been defined by the UK Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) as “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 1998); these sectors include advertising, designer fashion, film, video-games, and architecture and art. In the UK, national policy since the late 1990s has emphasized the creative industries as part of a broader strategy of becoming a “competitive knowledge economy” (DTI, 1999; NACCCE, 1999).

However, new growth theory suggests that all industries today necessarily involve creativity (eg Jefcutt and Pratt, 2002). In the age of innovation, creativity is of concern not only for economic sectors traditionally thought to involve creativity. OECD nations have responded by developing national policies “for encouraging knowledge generation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge diffusion, and the exploitation of knowledge” in science, research, and education (Peters and Humes, 2003, p2). Concrete efforts fall into two broad categories: enhancing the knowledge-generating potential of society, and reforming educational institutions to deliver learning that supports creative work.

To enhance the knowledge-generating potential of society, countries focus on the identification of institutional, societal, and communication structures that foster the diffusion and exploitation of knowledge. Organizational systems that foster retention and dissemination of knowledge are referred to as knowledge management systems. National systems that foster retention and dissemination of knowledge include infrastructure efforts that bring people together – transportation and communication networks.

To deliver learning that supports creative work – through schools and also in lifelong learning – national governments have focused on educational institutions. How might such institutions be reformed to most effectively foster learning for creativity? Information delivery is not enough – educational institutions need to prepare individuals to generate new knowledge. And because knowledge grows and changes so rapidly, learning must continue through the lifespan. The educational system must expand beyond compulsory formal schooling.

Since the first OECD report on the knowledge economy in 1996, the OECD played a leading role in exploring the implications of this shift:

OECD analysis is increasingly directed to understanding the dynamics of the knowledge-based economy and its relationship to traditional economics, as reflected in ‘new growth theory’. The growing codification of knowledge and its transmission through communications and computer networks has led to the emerging ‘information society’. The need for workers to acquire a range of skills and to continuously adapt these skills underlies the ‘learning economy’. The importance of knowledge and technology diffusion requires better understanding of knowledge networks and ‘national innovation systems’. (OECD, 1996; emphasis in original)

In the years following this prescient report, OECD’s CERI project generated a series of reports about the implications of this historic shift for educational institutions (OECD, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004).

In the first half of this report, I present a brief summary of recent research on creativity, collaboration, and learning, to provide an important background to the task of envisioning possible futures. I then identify five factors that shape a multi-dimensional space of possible futures: technology, customization of learning, diffusion of learning, organizational learning and innovation, and the role of educational professionals. Then I draw on recent research and these five factors to elaborate on six scenarios that were first presented in What Schools for the Future? (OECD, 2001).

Broadening our conceptions of creativity

Psychological research on creativity-from the 1960s focus on personality, through the 1970s and 1980s focus on cognition-have been limited to creative outputs that are highly valued in the West: fine art painting, basic science, and symphonic compositions. As a result, the exceptional creators that have been studied have been those who have excelled in one of these traditional European genres. In his 1993 book Creating Minds, Howard Gardner discussed seven exemplary creators: Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, (T.S.) Eliot, (Martha) Graham, and Gandhi. In his 1996 book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed 100 exceptional creators, almost all of whom attained their eminence through science or the fine arts.

These forms of creativity will play an important role in the creative societies of the future. But from an education and policy making perspective, these forms are unlikely to provide leverage for increasing the overall creativity of a society and an economy; specifically, they represent a small fraction of the overall revenues accruing to the creative industries. Pratt (2004) has argued that the term “creative industries” implies an individualistic view, such that artsy types are the “creatives” and others are not; thus he prefers the term “cultural industries”. The focus on fine art painting has resulted in a neglect of filmmaking, graphic arts (including website design), and animation (including video-games). The focus on basic science has resulted in a neglect of applied science, engineering, and technology, the source of many financially successful innovations. The focus on art music has resulted in a neglect of improvisational performance, of rock bands, of electronica, and music videos – all of which have substantially broader societal dissemination as well as larger economic impacts.

The traditional response has been to argue that high art forms represent the purest essence of the human creative impulse, and that these “lower” forms are made less pure by their revenue-generating potential. But this traditional response is almost impossible to defend any more, when artists themselves have been increasingly challenging this hierarchy and these divisions. In the 1960s, pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein broke the boundaries between high and low art, incorporating elements of advertising graphics and comic strips into their paintings. The Fluxus group began experimenting with performance and installation art, and in the following decades, installation art has become increasingly dominant within the mainstream art world. In the 1970s, the New Hollywood era in film was a major creative break in movie production. In the 1980s, the advent of MTV and its music videos enabled a new burst of creativity among dance choreographers and film artists. Any serious treatment of creativity in the early years of the 21^st century must consider the full range of human innovation. A complete explanation of creativity must also explain comic strips, animated cartoons, movies, music videos, mathematical theory, experimental laboratory science, the improvised performances of jazz and rock music, and the broad range of performance genres found in the world’s cultures (Sawyer, 2006c).

A focus on European high art forms implicitly privileges a set of values that is culturally and historically specific – at a time when innovation economies are found around the globe. In recent years, scholars in fields such as anthropology and sociology have examined the nature of creative genres in non-Western cultures, and have found that most of these non-Western genres are very different from European high art forms (Becker, 1982; Layton, 1991; Sawyer, 2006c). For example, many non-Western cultures have different conceptions of the individual and of creative activity that lead them to downplay the degree of originality in their works, and to emphasize their continuity with tradition (whereas in Western cultures, creators generally call attention to the originality in their works and emphasize how they break with tradition). A complete explanation of the global shift to an innovation economy requires a profound exploration of the broad range of human creative expression.

The increasing importance of collaborative creativity

Most studies of creativity have been conducted by psychologists. This research tends to focus on cognitive processes during and leading up to the moment of insight (eg Ward, Finke and Smith, 1995). This moment almost always occurs when the individual is alone, in isolation; as the peak experience in creative lives, its salience fascinates us and calls out for study. As a result, many creativity researchers have focused on the moment of creative insight, and attempted to analyze it as a psychological or cognitive process.

However, close studies of how creativity occurs in the real world reveals that the mythical moment of insight is misleading. The innovations that impact our world rarely emerge, fully formed, from a single moment of insight. Rather, they typically involve many small “mini-insights,” perhaps one or more each day; and the primary work of the creator is to bring those serial insights together over time, to result in effective innovation. Here are two typical reports from exceptionally creative individuals:

Literary critic Wayne Booth: “My creative periods tend to be sort of spread out rather than moments of actually clear illumination….generally speaking, it’s a matter of hard work and steady progress rather than moments of total transformation and clarity.” (in Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995, p357)

Sculptor Nina Holton: “You have these ideas, and then you work on them. As you work on them, you get new ideas….One makes the other one come out.” (in Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995, p353)

This requires conscious expertise on the part of the creator – to structure the work day so that these mini-insights continue to emerge, to implement systems and practices to enable each insight to spark the next, and to enable the aggregation of multiple insights to result in the eventual emergence of a worthwhile idea.

These mini insights are deeply embedded in a broader social process (Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995). The periods of hard work which precede and follow the insight are fundamentally social, deeply rooted in the social group of colleagues and in the individual’s internalized understanding of the creative domain itself. The balance of hard work and idle time which emerges from these interviews can also be viewed as a balance between social interaction and individual isolation. As Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer (1995) wrote, based on an interview study with 60 exceptional creators:

we found that creative individuals had a strong subjective awareness of external social or discipline influences at each creative stage. When asked to describe a moment of creative insight, they typically provided extended narratives that described not just a single moment but a complex, multi-stage process, with frequent discussions of interpersonal contact, strategic or political considerations, and awareness of the paradigm, of what questions were interesting as defined by the discipline …. The moment of creative insight … is surrounded and contextualized within an ongoing experience that is fundamentally social. (p334)

A psychological focus on the individual is contradicted by the empirical record in a second, more important, way: in the great majority of innovations throughout history, the small insights that eventually led to the innovation each were generated by different individuals. This research is consistent with sociological approaches such as the production of culture perspective (Peterson and Anand, 2004), as described by Pratt (2004):

The value of this perspective is that it seeks to present cultural outputs as the result of collective innovation by a number of participants whose participation is various, but linked together by the organization of production. Thus, it directs our attention to the analysis of complex organizational forms, as well as individual positioning within them, that constitute particular cultural forms. Production in this sense is not only suggestive of creative and innovative ideas, but also of the conditions under which these ideas may be mobilized (p118).

Innovations emerge from complex social systems, with constant communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, to accomplish the necessary process of enabling ideas to spark later ideas, and to enable a social process whereby the multiple component insights could be brought together appropriately to generate an effective innovation.

Collaboration in social networks accelerates innovation because more individuals can have more ideas. The challenge, of course, is to design effective organizational systems so that ideas build on each other, rather than opposing and canceling each other out; so that ideas accumulate over time to result in the emergence of creativity, rather than deteriorating in a political morass of failed projects.

In today’s economy, the most important forms of creativity – movies, television shows, big science experiments, music videos, compact disks, computer software, video-games – are joint cooperative activities of complex networks of skilled individuals. The creative products that US society, for example, is best known for today – including movies, music videos, and video-games – are all made by organized groups of highly specialized individuals.

In today’s creative society, even creative genres that have traditionally been associated with solitary individuals are reshaping around collaboration. For example, writing seems a uniquely solitary activity; however, much creative writing today is deeply collaborative. The scripts of all movies and television shows are created by teams of writers, each contributing throughout the process (Sawyer, in press). The internet has enabled new forms of collaborative writing. The best known is the wiki: a web page that anyone may modify at any time, such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Also well known is the community of bloggers, known as the blogosphere; this likewise represents a collective social phenomenon. Most bloggers provide links to other bloggers who write on the same topic, and frequently reference each other’s postings in their own.

Some writers have begun to form writers’ collaboratives – groups of writers who work together to author a single text, which is then published under the name of the collaborative and not any individual author. Two online writer communities that I turned up with an October 2008 internet search were Protagonize (www.protagonize.com) and StoryMash (www.storymash.com).

Various information technologies, including the internet, have enabled new forms of collaboration such as mash-ups and modding. A “mash-up” is a new combination of two existing products; it can refer to music or video sampling, but more commonly refers to web applications that combine data from more than one source. The Google Maps application supports mash-ups by allowing its mapping data to be used on other sites; for example, the WikiCrimes web site combines this map data with user postings of crime locations (http://www.wikicrimes.com). Mash-up sites often support broad collaboration by allowing all users to contribute; any user of WikiCrimes can mark the location of a crime.

“Modding” occurs when a user of a product modifies the product to better suit his or her needs. Modding is particularly common in strong user communities, where users collaborate to share their new modifications. Many examples of modding are found in extreme sports. As an example of modding, extreme bike jumpers often lift their feet off the pedals while in mid-air. This results in a problem: the bike pedals spin around during this time, making it difficult for the biker to get his feet positioned back on the pedals again at the end of the maneuver. One bike jumper modified the pedals to address this problem by inserting a small circle of foam padding on the pedal axle next to the pedal, thus preventing the pedals from spinning in midair but still allowing the pedals to be used when on the ground (Luthje, Herstatt and von Hippel, 2002). Many examples of modding are also found in software; dedicated video-gamers often reverse-engineer and modify their game’s program. An example is the widespread modding of the LEGO Mindstorms robotic control system (Koerner, 2006).

Theorizing collaboration

To explain the creativity of complex collaborating groups, we need a theoretical framework that allows us to understand how groups of people work together, and how the collective actions of many people result in a final created product. These forms of creative production involve distributed cognition-when each member of the team contributes an essential piece of the solution, and these individual components are all integrated together to form the collective product. Most of today’s important creative products are too large and complex to be generated by a single individual; they require a team or an entire company, with a division of labor and a careful integration of many specialized creative workers.

In the 1980s and 1990s, cognitive science underwent an important shift away from a focus on isolated individuals, toward a situated view of knowledge (Greeno, 2006; Robbins and Aydede, 2008). Cognitive scientists were deeply influenced by several strands of research including the ethno-methodological focus on meaning-making found in studies of situated cognition (eg Suchman, 1987); Hutchins’ (1995) work on collective cognition; and activity theory, practice theory, and sociocultural theory, based in American pragmatism and in the Soviet psychology of Vygotsky (as in works by M. Cole, B. Rogoff, and J. Wertsch). These studies documented many complex activities in which individuals participate as but one component in a distributed socio-technical system. Many of these studies take an anthropological approach to the study of task-focused work teams, and these studies have helped scholars to better understand how individuals and technological artifacts function in complex systems of activity. Such studies include the Lancaster study of air traffic control (Dourish, pp64-68) and collaborative virtual environments like DIVE and MASSIVE (Dourish, pp88-91). These studies demonstrate that social action is embedded, that social order emerges from practice, and that individuals and technological artifacts are unavoidably “embedded in a set of social and cultural practices” (Dourish, 2001, p97).

The concept of situated cognition is closely related to the concepts of embodiment and mutualism (Prinz, 2008). “Embodiment” is the notion that before computers can be truly intelligent they must move out into the world and become “embodied” in moving, acting robotic devices (Clark, 1997). Embodiment is central to Dourish’s (2001) discussion of what he calls tangible computing, a term meant to encompass Norman’s “invisible computing” and Weiser’s “ubiquitous computing.” For Dourish (2001), embodiment “means being grounded in everyday, mundane experience” (p125) and is “the property of our engagement with the world that allows us to make it meaningful” (p126).

“Mutualism” is the position that mind cannot be separated from the physical and biological world (Still and Costall, 1991). Mutualism shares with situated cognition a desire to avoid reductionism to any one explanatory factor – whether the physical brain (contrasted with the mental), or the individual mind (contrasted with the sociotechnical system). Mutualism shares an interest in exploring holistic phenomena that emerge from processes of complexity. As Pickering writes, “mutualism aims for emergence without mystery” – it rejects reductionist explanation of complex systems, but without arguing for any spooky non-material forces (Pickering, n.d.). Thus, the mental cannot be reduced to physical causes. Pickering allies this position with critiques of cognitivism including the embodiment tradition starting with Winograd and Flores (1986) and with connectionism (Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 1991).

Among education researchers, these theoretical approaches have been broadly influential, leading to what I call a sociocultural approach (Sawyer, 2005). Within socioculturalism, I include cultural psychologists, Vygotskian educational theorists, and those studying situated action in learning environments (Cole, 1996; Forman, Minick and Stone 1993; Greeno and Sawyer, 2008; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990; Suchman, 1987; Valsiner, 1998; Wertsch, 1998). This is a broad definition, because each of these areas holds to subtly different theoretical positions; but they can be grouped for our purposes because they generally hold to a view that the individual and the social are inseparable; the education researcher cannot meaningfully distinguish between what is internal to the individual and what is external context. As the prominent sociocultural psychologist Barbara Rogoff (1990) has argued, “The child and the social world are mutually involved to an extent that precludes regarding them as independently definable” (p28).

Sociocultural approaches are broadly compatible with two prominent traditions in the study of collaboration and learning: First, researchers working within a Piagetian socio-cognitive framework have emphasized the mediating role played by conflict and controversy (Bearison, Magzamen and Filardo, 1986; Doise and Mugny, 1984; Miller, 1987; Perret-Clermont, 1980); second, researchers working within a Vygotskian framework have emphasized how participants build on each other’s ideas to jointly construct a new understanding that none of the participants had prior to the encounter (Forman, 1992; Forman and Cazden, 1985; Palincsar, 1998).

The learning sciences

Soon after the turn of the century, education researchers began to publish books and reports exploring the implications for formal schools of the transition to the age of innovation (eg Bereiter, 2002; Hargreaves, 2003; Sawyer, 2006b). As this transformation continues in the future, knowledge and learning will become increasingly important. For career success, each individual worker will be expected to know a great deal more, and to continually learn to adapt to a changing technological and competitive environment. However, this knowledge must be of a type that can support creative work. The field that studies how different forms of knowledge align with different forms of learning is called the learning sciences (Sawyer, 2006a). Learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning. The learning sciences has been deeply influenced by the above shifts in cognitive science, away from a focus on individual mental representations and processes, toward distributed cognition, situativity, and embodiment. Learning scientists study learning in a variety of settings – not only the more formal learning of school classrooms, but also the more informal learning that takes place at home, on the job, and among peers. The goal of the learning sciences is to better understand the cognitive and social processes that result in the most effective learning, and to use this knowledge to redesign classrooms and other learning environments so that people learn more deeply and more effectively. The sciences of learning include cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, sociology, information sciences, neurosciences, education, design studies, instructional design, and other fields. In the remainder of this report, I draw on learning sciences findings to identify a set of recommendations for how societies can respond to key trends through 2025 and beyond.

Sawyer (2006d) has argued that schools cannot effectively respond to the shift to a knowledge-based creative economy without first moving beyond widely held assumptions about schooling that include the following:

• Conception of knowledge. Knowledge is a collection of facts and procedures.
• Conception of schooling. The goal of schooling is to transfer facts and procedures into students’ heads.
• Conception of the teacher. The teacher is the individual who possesses these facts and procedures, and whose mission is to transfer them to students.
• Conception of curriculum. Simpler facts and procedures are to be transferred first; later facts and procedures progressively build on top of these simpler ones.
• Conception of assessment. The success of schooling can be determined by administering paper-and-pencil tests that determine how many of these facts and procedures the student has internalized.

Collectively, this set of traditional assumptions has been called, variously, a transmission and acquisition model (Rogoff, 1997), the banking metaphor (Freire, 1989), instructionism (Papert, 1993), and the standard model (OECD, 2008).

The problem is that this standard model was designed for the industrialized economy of the early 20^th century. Although schools based on this model have been effective at transmitting a standard body of facts and procedures to students, they are not able to support students in mastering the kinds of knowledge required for creative work. But the structural configurations of today’s schools make it very hard to create learning environments that result in deeper understanding. One of the central underlying themes of the learning sciences is that students learn deeper knowledge when they engage in activities that are similar to the everyday activities of professionals who work in a discipline. This focus on authentic practice is based on a new conception of the expert knowledge that underlies knowledge work in today’s economy. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists began to study science itself, and they began to discover that newcomers become members of a discipline by learning how to participate in all of the practices that are central to professional life in that discipline. And increasingly, cutting-edge work in the sciences is done at the boundaries of disciplines; for this reason, students need to learn the underlying models, mechanisms, and practices that apply across many scientific disciplines, rather than learning in the disconnected units that are found in many standard model science classrooms.

I have argued (Sawyer, 2008) that learning environments that prepare learners for the knowledge economy will look very different from this standard model. Key characteristics include the following:

Deeper conceptual understanding. Rather than simple accumulation of facts and skills, learners construct deeper conceptual understanding and the ability to think and problem solve with their knowledge.

Availability of diverse knowledge sources. Learners can acquire knowledge whenever they need it from a variety of sources: books, websites, and experts around the globe.

Collaborative group learning. Students learn together as they work collaboratively on authentic, inquiry-oriented projects.

Assessment for deeper understanding. Tests should evaluate the student’s deeper conceptual understanding, the extent to which their knowledge is integrated, coherent, and contextualized.

I elaborate each of these characteristics in the four following sections.

Deeper conceptual understanding

By the 1980s, cognitive scientists had discovered that children retain material better, and are able to generalize it to a broader range of contexts, when they learn deep knowledge rather than surface knowledge, and when they learn how to use that knowledge in real-world social and practical settings. In the late 1980s, these learning scientists began to argue that standard model schools were not aligned with the knowledge economy.

Studies of knowledge workers show that they almost always apply their expertise in complex social settings, with a wide array of technologically advanced tools along with old-fashioned pencil, paper, chalk, and blackboards. These observations led many cognitive scientists to a situated view of knowledge, as described above, and learning sciences researchers have adopted this situated view (Greeno, 2006). “Situated” means that knowledge is not just a static mental structure inside the learner’s head; instead, knowing is a process that involves the person, the tools and other people in the environment, and the activities in which that knowledge is being applied. This perspective moves beyond a transmission and acquisition conception of learning that is implicit in the standard model; in addition to acquiring content, what happens during learning is that patterns of participation in collaborative activity change over time (Rogoff, 1990).

In the knowledge economy, memorization of facts and procedures is not enough for success. Educated graduates need a deep conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge – through complex cognitive operations such as conceptual elaboration and conceptual combination. They need to be able to critically evaluate what they read, to be able to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing, and to be able to understand scientific and mathematical thinking. They need to learn integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalized and decontextualized facts emphasized by instructionism. They need to be able to take responsibility for their own continuing, life-long learning. These abilities are important to the economy, to the continued success of participatory democracy, and to living a fulfilling, meaningful life. The standard model of schooling is particularly ill-suited to the education of creative professionals who can develop new knowledge and continually further their own understanding.

Diverse knowledge sources

In the standard model, the teacher is assumed to possess all of the knowledge. In the type of learning suggested by learning sciences research (for example, scaffolded constructivist activities such as inquiry- and project-based learning) students gain expertise from a variety of sources – from the internet, at the library, or through email exchange with a working professional – and the teacher will no longer be the only source of expertise in the classroom. Learners will acquire knowledge from diverse sources; of course, expert support from the teacher can facilitate these learning processes, but the teacher’s involvement will not be one of transmitting knowledge.

Collaboration

In the first part of this report, I emphasized the increasing importance of collaboration, both in creativity and in learning. In addition to this body of research supporting the educational benefits of collaboration, the innovation economy demands graduates who are highly skilled at creating together in groups (Sawyer, 2007). But in standard model schools, there is a belief that a student only knows something when that student can do it on his or her own, without any use of outside resources. There is a mismatch between the standard model and the situated, collaborative knowledge and practice that I described above.

Assessment

David Guile (2003) has explored the implications of the knowledge economy for educational institutions and for the policy debate. He begins with the concept of “credentialism” (Young, 1998), one possible response to the shift to the knowledge economy. Credentialism is the belief that education is about the acquisition of pre-existing knowledge; the goal of educational institutions should be to ensure that “the vast majority of the population achieve qualifications or certified skills and knowledge that relate to their future employment” (Guile, 2003, p92). Learning is conceived of as the acquisition of certified knowledge and skills, and lifelong learning is conceived of as a continuing accumulation of qualifications.

Guile goes on to point out that this conception of knowledge and learning is inadequate – mastering existing knowledge and skills is not sufficient to generate the new knowledge that the innovation economy requires. First, credentialism assumes that knowledge and skills are decontextualized commodities to be acquired; when in fact, in knowledge-intensive workplaces knowledge is situated – embedded in contexts and social practices (Greeno and Sawyer, 2008; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Furthermore, the key need is for workers who are capable of continuing innovation, and the certifications granted by today’s educational institutions provide no measure of that capability (Guile and Fonda, 1999; Young, 1998).

The danger is that policy makers could attempt to address the educational needs of the creative society by providing credentialist solutions. In fact, this has been the primary form of response in the UK and the EU (Guile, 2003), and the United States, with the 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation, with its core focus on standardized test measures.

As I argue below, the schools of the future will increasingly result in customized learning. Yet today’s assessments require that every student learn the same thing at the same time. The standards movement and the resulting high-stakes testing are increasing standardization, at the same time that learning sciences and technology are making it possible for individual students to have customized learning experiences. Customization combined with diverse knowledge sources enable students to learn different things. Schools will still need to measure learning for accountability purposes, but we don’t yet know how to reconcile accountability with customized learning.

In today’s high-stakes testing environment, learning sciences researchers need to demonstrate that their methods result in better student outcomes (Pellegrino, Chudowsky and Glaser, 2001). Today’s standardized tests assess relatively superficial knowledge and do not assess the deep knowledge required by the knowledge society. Standardized tests, almost by their very nature, evaluate decontextualized and compartmentalized knowledge. For example, mathematics tests do not assess model-based reasoning (Lehrer and Schauble, 2006); science tests do not assess whether pre-existing misconceptions have indeed been left behind (diSessa, 2006; Linn, 2006) nor do they assess problem-solving or inquiry skills (Krajcik and Blumenfeld, 2006). As long as schools are evaluated on how well their students do on such tests, it will be difficult for them to leave the standard model behind.

One of the key issues moving forward is how to design new kinds of assessment that correspond to the deep knowledge required in today’s knowledge society (Carver, 2006; Means, 2006). Several learning sciences researchers are developing new assessments that focus on deeper conceptual understanding.

In classrooms that make day-to-day use of computer software, installed on each student’s own personal computer, there is an interesting new opportunity for assessment-the assessment could be built into the software itself. After all, the learning sciences has found that effective educational software has to closely track the students’ developing knowledge structures to be effective; since that tracking is being done anyway, it would be a rather straightforward extension to make summary versions of it available to teachers. New learning sciences software is exploring how to track deep learning during the learning process, in some cases inferring student learning from such subtle cues as where the learner moves and clicks the mouse-providing an opportunity for assessment during the learning itself, not in a separate multiple-choice quiz (eg Gobert, Buckley and Dede, 2005).

Five factors impacting the future of learning

As the age of innovation unfolds over the coming decades, and societies, organizations, and educational institutions evolve, the following unresolved challenges must be addressed. How these challenges are resolved will in large part determine which future scenario of learning will emerge.

1. Technology

For decades, educational futurists have been claiming that computers will change schools. The first was in the 1950s, when B.F. Skinner claimed that his “teaching machines” made the teacher “out of date” (1954, 1968, p22). Then, Papert’s 1980 book Mindstorms argued that giving every child a computer would allow students to actively construct their own learning, leaving teachers with an uncertain role: “schools as we know them today will have no place in the future” (p9). The rise of the internet in the 1990s resulted in an increasing belief that ICT would soon transform schools. However, despite decades of rapid growth in the capabilities of ICT, and substantial government funding to install computers and high-speed internet connections into schools, there is almost no evidence that ICT has enhanced learning (Cuban, 2001). Furthermore, research suggests that when ICT are introduced to schools, they are embedded into existing standard model practices, rather than used to drive a fundamental transformation of schooling. For example, many textbook publishers today are convinced that within a few years, paper textbooks will be replaced by laptop computers that store all of a student’s textbooks and curriculum materials. But if every student has a laptop that contains the same textbooks as before, nothing fundamental has changed.

So it is important to make a distinction between ICT that sustains the existing standard model, and ICT that transforms the standard model towards a more learning-sciences based learning environment. Learning scientists are exploring technologies that support the authentic, situated, and collaborative essence of creative learning (see Sawyer, 2006a). One example is the increasing use of inexpensive wireless interactive learning devices (WILD), handheld computers that are networked and capable of communicating with each other. WILD include personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as the Palm Pilot, and also, increasingly, mobile phones. The promise of harnessing computing where every student has his or her own computer, and where they are available everyday, anytime, anywhere for equitable, personal, effective, and engaging learning give WILD a greater transformative potential than desktop computers. As of 2006, more than 10% of US schools provided handhelds to students (Pea and Maldonado, 2006). The popularity of handhelds reflects the desire of schools to make computing integral to the curriculum, rather than only occasionally used in labs. As of 2005, 55% percent of U.S. children between the ages of 8 and 18 owned a handheld videogame player (Pea and Maldonado, 2006). Since that report, a new generation of handheld devices has become available that have internet capabilities, such as the Nintendo DS and the iPhone 3G, and similar devices raise the level of internet sophistication even higher. At present, there is almost no educational software available for these platforms, but the potential is enormous. One promising current effort is the European Union’s m-Learning project (www.m-learning.org). The m-Learning project is aimed at young adults, aged 16-24, who are most at risk of social exclusion, and the project’s goal is to develop new products and services that will deliver learning experiences via inexpensive, portable devices that are accessible to almost everyone, primarily, mobile phones.

The potential is that this technology could support a form of technology use that is embedded in the ongoing situated practice of the learning community. The 2004 FutureLab report Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning (Naismith, Lonsdale, Vavoula and Sharples, 2004) emphasizes the alignment between the affordances of WILD and the key principles emerging from learning sciences research. First, WILD enable learners to actively construct their own knowledge, for example through participatory simulations such as the Virus Game (Collella, 2000), where learners play the role of hosts in the spread of a virus, and their WILD keep track of who they meet and how the virus spreads. Second, WILD support situated activities that are embedded in authentic contexts, such as MOBIlearn (Lonsdale et al, 2003), a major European research project that is focused on context-aware delivery of content and services, using location-sensitive technologies such as GPS. Third, WILD support collaborative learning environments, both because the devices are networked, and also because they are small enough to be used while learners are engaged in face-to-face activities. An example is the MCSCL project in Chile (Zurita and Nussbaum, 2004), which is using hand-held computers to encourage face-to-face collaboration.

In addition to the potential classroom applications, WILD also enable anytime, anywhere learning, because students can interact with learning content outside of the classroom. Educational software companies have the opportunity to provide small pieces of educational content that students can access while they are engaged in a different activity: watching television or waiting for the bus.

The addition of GPS capabilities to these devices provides for another potential opportunity: context and location sensitive learning software. Several projects are exploring educational applications that respond to the wearer’s current location, such as tour guides (Abowd et al, 1997) and location-aware language learning applications that adapt the content presented according to users’ location (Ogata and Yano, 2005), and digitally augmented field trips (Rogers et al, 2004; Williams et al, 2005). Handhelds are becoming particularly widespread in informal learning settings such as science centers and other museums.

Because learners are networked together as they use WILD, it is an example of computer support collaborative learning (CSCL), a burgeoning research area with international conferences every alternate year. The acronym MCSCL is sometimes used to refer to Mobile CSCL. These applications are usually internet-based and often rely on desktop computers as well as wireless devices. Even when based on desktop computers, CSCL applications share many of the same benefits: they enable collaborative, authentic learning that extends beyond the boundaries of the classroom.

The key to avoiding the mistakes of past advocates of learning technology is to realize that computers will never attain their full potential if they are merely add-ons to the existing standard model classroom. Appropriate use of information technology requires a fundamental rethinking of the entire learning environment.

2. Customization

The goals of standard model schools were to ensure standardization – all students were to memorize and master the same core curriculum – and this model has been reasonably effective at accomplishing these goals. Standard model schools were structured, scheduled, and regimented in a fashion that was explicitly designed by analogy with the industrial-age factory (Callahan, 1962), and this structural alignment facilitated the ease of transition from school student to factory worker.

In the standard model, everyone learns the same thing at the same time. Many parallel structures and processes of these schools align to enforce standardization. But learning sciences findings suggest that each student learns best when they are placed in a learning environment that is sensitive to their pre-existing cognitive structures; and learning sciences research has shown that different learners enter the classroom with different structures. Learning sciences research suggests that more effective learning will occur if each learner receives a customized learning experience.

Educational software gives us the opportunity to provide a customized learning experience to each student to a degree not possible when one teacher is responsible for six classrooms of 25 students each. Well-designed software could sense each learner’s unique learning style and developmental level, and tailor the presentation of material appropriately (see Koedinger and Corbett, 2006, for an example). Some students could take longer to master a subject, while others would be faster, because the computer can provide information to each student at his or her own pace. And each student could learn each subject at different rates; for example, learning what we think of today as “5^th grade” reading and “3^rd grade” math at the same time. In age-graded classrooms this would be impossible, but in alternative models of schooling there may be no educational need to age-grade classrooms, no need to hold back the more advanced children or to leave behind those who need more help, and no reason for a child to learn all subjects at the same rate.

In many countries, age-graded classrooms also serve to socialize children, providing opportunities to make friends, to form peer groups, and to participate in team sports. Some of these activities may not seem critical to learning, but there is a broad base of research suggesting that peer learning is uniquely effective. If learning and schooling were no longer age-graded, other institutions would have to emerge to provide these opportunities. Finally, if primary and secondary schooling are no longer age graded, then higher education could no longer expect all incoming students to be the same age, and this would result in dramatic transformations of traditional universities.

3. Diffusion of education

Museums and public libraries might play an increasingly larger role in education. They could receive increased funding to support their evolution into learning resource centers, perhaps even receiving an increasingly large portion of government education funding. They could participate in several ways: for example, by developing curriculum and lesson plans and making these available to students anywhere over the internet, and by providing physical learning environments as they redesign their buildings to support schooling. Science centers have already taken the lead in this area, developing inquiry-based curricula and conducting teacher professional development, but art and history museums may soon follow suit.

The boundary between formal schooling and continuing education will increasingly blur. The milestone of a high school diploma could gradually decrease in importance, as the nature of learning in school begins to look more and more like on-the-job apprenticeship and adult distance education. The $100 computer and the inexpensive handheld allow for learning to take place anywhere, anytime; 16 year olds could work their part-time jobs during the day and take their classes at night, just like adults do now. Many types of knowledge are better learned in workplace environments; this kind of learning will be radically transformed by the availability of anywhere, anytime learning, as new employees take their laptops or handhelds on the job with them, with software specially designed to provide apprenticeship support in the workplace. Professional schools could be radically affected; new forms of portable just-in-time learning could increasingly put their campus-based educational models at risk.

The relationship between the institution of school and the rest of society may need to change, as the internet allows learners to interact with adult professionals outside the school walls, and as classroom activities become increasingly authentic and embedded in real-world practice.

The internet enables learning to take place anywhere. For example, as of 2005, 22 US states had established online virtual schools; during the 2003-2004 school year, the Florida Virtual School became the state’s 73^rd school district, and now receives per-student funding from the state just like any other district. In the 2004-2005 school year, 21,000 students enrolled in at least one of its courses (Borja, 2005).

The term “Web 2.0″ is often used to refer to a shift in internet usage to more active forms of participation, where all users contribute content and play the role of both producer and consumer (as opposed to “Web 1.0″ where experts generated content and users were primarily limited to the role of consumer). Web 2.0 includes wikis, blogging, multiplayer online games, and modding and mash-ups. Many education researchers are experimenting with Second Life, an internet-based virtual world where individuals can create on-screen characters called avatars, and then communicate with each other through their keyboards. Many university instructors have created classrooms in Second Life; at the Open University in the United Kingdom, the Schome project (www.schome.ac.uk) has created online learning communities for both teenagers and adults. This has led some to suggest that education might experience a similar shift to Education 2.0 – a world that supports collaborative learning, active participatory learning, and new forms of inquiry: new forms of engaging with knowledge (TLRP, 2008).

However, there are many challenges posed when Web 2.0 technologies are introduced into schools. The TLRP report Education 2.0? (TLRP, 2008) has noted that Web 2.0 challenges traditional notions of authority, authorship, and integrity; this may be welcomed by some, but resisted by others. The structure of the curriculum could change radically, even to an extreme of learners developing their own curricula. The challenge is to find a way to harness the collaborative and participatory power of Web 2.0, while retaining valued curricular goals and guidance of experts and teachers.

4. Organizational learning

The organizations that thrive will be those that successfully master the challenges of organizational learning and knowledge management. Future schools will face these challenges.

Organizational learning refers to the activities, processes, and structures through which individuals “acquire, share, and combine knowledge through experience with one another” (Argote, Gruenfeld and Naquin, 2001, p370). Organizational learning processes can be explicitly designed with the goal of increasing organizational learning, or they can be emergent and informal. Organizational learning is an emergent property of groups, and cannot be equated with the sum of the individual learning that happens in the members of the organization.

Knowledge management refers to the processes and structures that retain and distribute knowledge in an organization. Without knowledge management, organizational learning can only be of limited effectiveness, because organizational learning occurs at the team level (Edmondson, 2002), and therefore large complex organizations need systems in place to disseminate knowledge among teams.

Knowledge management has proven to be a difficult task. Several software vendors offer products that purport to accomplish knowledge management – databases where knowledge workers are to enter important information about their experiences with projects, customers, or challenges, marked with keywords that would allow later retrieval by anyone in the organization. However, almost all companies that have implemented such systems have found them to be of extremely limited value; in most cases, staff rather quickly stops using the system altogether.

Most schools today are structured as highly bureaucratic and top-down organizational forms. Such organizational forms have proven to be the least effective at successful organizational learning and knowledge management. A challenge moving forward is for schools to revise their organizational forms to enable adaptive and agile learning and knowledge management. Teacher professional development communities are one promising attempt in this direction (Fishman and Davis, 2006).

5. Educational professionals

In one vision of the innovation economy, the teacher becomes a creative worker, jointly constructing knowledge with learners in a creative classroom. Teachers are considered to be creative professionals, and are trained and rewarded accordingly. Sawyer (2004) has argued that creative teaching involves disciplined improvisation: the ability to draw on the routines and practices that are acquired through experience, but to modify them improvisationally to respond to each classroom’s needs at the moment. Disciplined improvisation acknowledges the benefits of frameworks; well-designed curricula are necessary to effectively scaffold constructivist learning. To create an improvisational classroom, the teacher must have a high degree of pedagogical content knowledge-to respond creatively to unexpected student queries, a teacher must have a more profound understanding of the material than if the teacher is simply reciting a preplanned lecture or script (Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann, 1986; Shulman, 1987). An unexpected student query often requires the teacher to think quickly and creatively, accessing material that may not have been studied the night before in preparation for this class; and it requires the teacher to quickly and improvisationally be able to translate their own knowledge of the subject into a form that will communicate with that student’s level of knowledge.

There are, however, some who espouse a very different vision: of a scripted, “teacher-proof” classroom such that just about anyone would be capable of serving as a teacher. In this vision, sometimes known as “direct instruction,” education researchers and curriculum experts develop a highly detailed lesson plan for each class session: so detailed that, in some cases, all of the teacher’s utterances are scripted. In schools that have implemented this vision, teachers are reprimanded if they diverge from the official script that appears in their lesson plan. In such classrooms, the only skill required of a teacher is the ability to read the script, speak clearly, and manage the students to maintain a focused classroom.

This vision of the de-skilled teacher aligns with the credentialist, instructionist paradigm that I described earlier, and learning sciences research suggests that such a curriculum is not capable of generating creative graduates. Consequently, this vision also aligns with the possibility that the economy could become radically deskilled.

Even if such a vision comes to pass in the great majority of schools, there are likely to continue to be creative classroom options available to those who can afford it. The risk is of a social order that reproduces itself through these imbalances in the education system: deskilled classrooms for the majority of citizens, which prepare them only for deskilled labor, and creative classrooms for a privileged elite, who have been tapped to move into those few professions that continue to require creativity.

Related to these two competing visions of the teacher is the possibility that the role of “teacher” could devolve into multiple roles. For example, the teaching profession could become multi-tiered, with master teachers developing curriculum in collaboration with software developers and acting as consultants to schools, and learning centers staffed by a variety of independent contractors whose job no longer involves lesson preparation or grading, but instead involves mostly assisting students as they work at the computer or gather data in the field (Stallard and Cocker, 2001).

The challenges to any transformation of the teaching profession are likely to include resistance from teachers’ professional organizations, unless the transformations are handled with great sensitivity and political skill. A second challenge would be faced by institutions of higher education responsible for preparing these educational professionals; they currently are designed to prepare for a single, unified teaching profession. In most countries, teachers are certified by government bodies, and before educational certification could become multi-tiered, complex political and institutional processes would have to take place.

Possible Future Scenarios

In the face of the above variables, factors, and pressures, a society’s response to the age of innovation could move down a range of different paths. I group my comments into the six scenarios that are outlined in the OECD report What Schools for the Future? (OECD, 2001). I believe these still best represent the possible range of futures.

Scenario 1: Robust bureaucratic school systems

Schools continue much as they are today. They are characterized by strong, centralized bureaucracies, with standardization and uniformity emphasized. Despite all of the forces identified above, in Scenario 1 schools as institutions prove to be extremely resistant to radical change. This could result due to a combination of vested interests, powerful stakeholders, and parents who prefer only gradual change in schools. It could also result from the importance of the non-classroom functions of schools: providing a place for two-career parents to place their children during the day, socialization, sorting and selection, and the credentialing function.

Forces that work against Scenario 1 include the growing power of learners and parents as producers and participants in learning (“Education 2.0″), the impact of ICT in disseminating learning outside the classroom walls, and a potential crisis in the teacher workforce (which, if taken to an extreme, results in Scenario 6).

Scenario 2: Extending the market model

Advocates of a politically conservative approach – those who hold that the free market always provides better and more efficient solutions – will continue to argue that education should be privatized. An open market of free competition, they argue, will allow educational innovations to be tried, and the successful ones will thrive and propagate. The current centralized government model, they argue, is incapable of innovation due to standardization and top-down control.

In Scenario 2, the conservative vision comes to pass, perhaps due to increasing dissatisfaction with public schools. Government funding is distributed directly to parents, who then choose from a range of educational offerings. Privately-run, for-profit learning centers might begin to offer a three-hour intensive workday, structured around tutors and individualized educational software, with each student taking home his or her laptop to complete the remainder of the day at home. In the US, one of the largest for-profit educational franchises is Sylvan Learning Centers; these storefront operations could expand dramatically if given access to government funding. Because curriculum and software would be designed centrally, and the software does the grading automatically, these tutors could actually leave their work at the office – unlike today’s teachers, who stay up late every night and spend all weekend preparing lesson plans and grading. For those parents who need an all-day option for their children due to their work schedule, for-profit charter schools could proliferate, each based on a slightly different curriculum or a slightly different software package. Particularly skilled teachers could develop reputations that would allow them to create their own “start-up schools,” taking 10 or 20 students into their home for some or all of the school day – the best of them providing serious competition for today’s elite private schools, and earning as much as other knowledge workers such as lawyers, doctors, and executives.

The history of innovation suggests that frequent experimentation is necessary for innovation to occur. To enhance innovation, educational systems must develop some way to allow frequent variations to be attempted, and some method for selecting and disseminating the best of these innovations. The innovations must be sustainable over time, and they must be scalable to large numbers of schools and districts. The market is one such mechanism for selection and dissemination; if Scenario 3 is rejected, then another such mechanism must be proposed and implemented.

One risk of allowing competition and innovation in the free market is that the education system could fragment, with some schools offering a creative education (possibly for a small elite) and other schools offering credentialist training in specific, narrowly tailored sets of job-specific skills.

Scenario 3: Schools as core social centers

Schools are largely viewed as successful and are widely respected as playing a central function in society. The level of public support for schools increases, as a broad public recognizes that schools perform a necessary public role. Schools are viewed as centers of a community, and as serving not only the function of educating individuals, but also as serving a collective function of community building and social capital formation. Poor areas receive increased funding to accommodate their relatively greater need.

Schools as core social centers not only serve full-time primary and secondary students, but also play a role in adult and continuing education. Schools become less bureaucratic and more diverse. The boundaries marking one school level from the next become more flexible, as learning is increasingly viewed as a lifelong process. There is greater mixing of ages, and increased youth-adult activities.

Schools work increasingly closely with other community institutions (libraries, museums, social service agencies), viewing themselves as one node in a network. The professional role of teacher evolves to collaborate more closely with other sources of community expertise. Thus the local role of schools becomes much more critical; centralization and uniformity at the national level declines in significance.

Scenario 4: Schools as focused learning organizations

As in Scenario 3, schools enjoy high levels of public trust and increased funding, and equity is an important issue, with poorer schools receiving increased funding to address these disadvantages. Schools reform themselves around a knowledge-society agenda, based in the sort of learning sciences research described earlier in this report. Experimentation and innovation are common, curriculum variations are widespread. More specialized classrooms and schools might emerge (focused for example on the arts, foreign languages and affairs, or technology). Schools retain an important credentialing function, although other forms of credentialing may also emerge; new forms of assessment frequently appear.

Schools become true learning organizations, capable of generating and disseminating innovation. Organizational structures become flatter, with a reduction in hierarchical levels as teams of teachers take on leadership responsibilities. Teachers are viewed as knowledgeable professionals and are more motivated and more highly paid. There is an increasing mobility in and out of teaching and other professions. Compared to Scenario 3, teaching remains a distinct profession with a clear identity, but with more frequent mobility and with more connections to other professionals than in Scenarios 1 or 2. Students often work in small groups, in environments that include not only teachers but other knowledge workers. There may be a wide variety in age grading and ability mixes. ICT is widespread, as are network and communication links outside the schools to other knowledge industries and creative industries.

Scenarios 3 and 4 both display similarities to the future envisioned by the New Horizons for Learning team (www.newhorizons.org), as presented for example in (Dickinson, 2000): schools replaced by community learning centers and radically elaborated public libraries-open 18 hours a day-and early childhood parenting centers.

Scenario 5: Learner networks and the network society

Several trends that I have identified above – the diffusion of education, diverse knowledge sources, and customization – if taken to an extreme could result in a scenario in which schools as we know them become obsolete. (The OECD report refers to Scenarios 5 and 6 as “de-schooling” scenarios.) Today’s large public schools were designed in an industrial era and were based on instructionism, an outmoded model of schooling. Roger Schank (1999) and Seymour Papert (1980) have argued that computer technology is so radically transformative that schools as we know them will have to fade away before the full benefits can be realized. It may be impossible to implement alternative models of learning in the institution that today we know of as school. If today’s schools cannot adapt rapidly enough, parents may increasingly abandon schools and seek other alternatives. The flight from schools would begin with the educated classes, and also with various religious and interest groups. Under pressure from parents, politicians may follow this by reducing funding for schools and increasing funding for other options.

If education diffuses radically, schools may no longer be physical locations where everyone goes to learn; learning could take place at home, on the job, or online. Imagine a nation of online home-based activities organized around small neighborhood learning clubs, all connected through high-bandwidth internet software. There would be no textbooks, few lectures, and no curriculum as we know it today. New forms of credentialing, assessment, and competence measures could proliferate. Software, media, and publishing companies could innovate new forms of curriculum and learning delivery that could accelerate Scenario 5. “Teachers” would operate as independent consultants who work from home most of the time, and occasionally meet with ad-hoc groups of students at a learning club. Each meeting would be radically different in nature, depending on the project-based and self-directed learning that those students were engaged in. In fact, each type of learning session might involve a different learning specialist; new types of learning professionals might emerge – for example, staffing telephone or internet helplines for students, or offering home visits for short tutoring sessions.

Variations of Scenario 5 are commonly presented by education futurists; “Education 2.0″ falls in this category. Scenario 5 supports flexibility, extremely customized learning for each individual, and networked and disseminated learning. One risk, however, is that those at the lowest socioeconomic levels could be left behind in this transformation; a few schools might remain to serve these most disadvantaged students. These may or may not be well-funded institutions, depending on the commitment of society to educating even its poorest citizens.

A second challenge is how Scenario 5 could satisfy the non-classroom functions currently performed by schools: for example, providing a safe place for children while parents work during the day, providing socialization opportunities with peers. Scenario 5 could not come to pass unless other institutions emerged, in parallel with the de-schooling process, to take on these functions.

Scenario 6: Teacher exodus-the “meltdown” scenario

As in Scenario 5, schools are unable to respond to these broad societal shifts, due to institutional inertia. Public respect for schools declines, and funding drops, to the point where schools are no longer able to attract qualified teachers. As today’s teachers retire, and the knowledge society demands increasingly high qualifications for teachers, communities may not be willing to increase funding levels as necessary to attract the teachers needed in the knowledge society.

We are likely to see a wide range of responses to the teacher shortage, from innovative to traditional. One response will be to move to a deskilled teaching profession, with scripted and “teacher-proof” curricula. Other responses will include an increasing use of ICT as an alternative to teachers.

If this scenario comes to pass, educational equity will be a key challenge. For example, several futurists have predicted that automatization will accelerate dramatically so that an increasing number of jobs can be automated (Pink, 2005). This trend could combine with increased globalization such that unskilled jobs would almost all relocate to low-wage countries. The effect on advanced economies would be to create a radically tiered social structure, with a few highly paid creative knowledge workers at the top, and the great majority of the workforce having extremely limited job opportunities (apart from service sector jobs, such as waiting on tables or repairing automobiles, that are resistant to automatization and outsourcing).

In such a society, it would become politically difficult to argue that creative abilities were required of all citizens. In a difficult budgetary and funding environment, it might begin to be perceived as inefficient to invest in a learning sciences-based education for the entire workforce if only a small percentage of workers would eventually need those skills. A tiered educational system could then emerge, with a small cadre of creative and highly paid teachers educating the creative workers of the future, and a much larger cadre of relatively unskilled teachers simply executing scripted curricula.

Final challenges

I believe that some combination of Scenarios 3, 4, and 5 represent the best form of schooling for the innovation age. However, there are substantial societal and institutional forces in place that work against any transformation to such a future. To avoid Scenarios 1, 2, or 6, learning sciences researchers will have to develop four broad categories of materials, to work as a unified whole, while allowing for adaptation and customizability:

Textbooks must be rewritten (or even reconceived as laptop-based software packages), to present knowledge in the developmentally appropriate sequence suggested by the learning sciences, and to present knowledge as a coherent, integrated whole, rather than as a disconnected series of decontextualized facts. This poses substantial challenges for private textbook publishers, and for the school leaders who review and approve textbooks.

Curricular units must be prepared that are suitable for teachers to draw on and adapt to the unique needs of each classroom. These could be developed by private publishers, or a form of open-source community of educators could emerge to allow teachers to share and build on their own curricular innovations (several such communities exist online today; see Fishman and Davis, 2006).

Educational software that is based on learning sciences principles must be made commercially available. This poses substantial challenges for the private companies that develop such software. Exciting new learning applications are emerging from university research laboratories, but few of these are being developed into commercial products – in large part, because other aspects of schools, identified in this report, also need to change before such applications can be successfully implemented.

Assessments must be developed that assess deep knowledge instead of surface knowledge, and to take into account the fact that due to customization, different learners might learn different subject matter (Pellegrino, Chudowsky and Glaser, 2001). These new forms of assessment do not yet exist, and a clear vision of how such tests would be constructed has not yet emerged from learning sciences research. A critical issue for the future is to continue this work. Test construction is complex, involving field tests of reliability and validity for example, and will require learning scientists to work with psychometricians and policy experts (Pellegrino, Chudowsky and Glaser, 2001).

In addition to these scholarly challenges, an even bigger challenge to assessment reform is likely to be political. It will not be easy to convince those government bodies responsible for educational assessment to transition to these fundamentally new assessments-in no small part because parents may resist the use of tests that look very different from the ones they experienced in school. A further political difficulty is that during the transition period to learning-sciences based classrooms and deeper forms of assessment, there is likely to be a period of several years during which different children are likely to excel at the new assessments than at the old. Those parents whose children seem to be disadvantaged by lower scores are likely to actively resist the new assessments.

Conclusion

We are entering the innovation age. In the decades ahead, as the nations of the world respond to the demand for innovation, creativity will be increasingly valued. There are no forces at present, and none potentially on the horizon, that would result in a return to an industrial-age economy; no forces that would reduce the importance of creativity to society and the economy.

However, the innovation age could unfold along a broad range of paths. The most humanistic, liberal view is of a world where all people realize their full creative potential through effective educational institutions and work environments, and find fulfillment through creative work and creative leisure activities. However, a more class-based outcome is also possible – a world in which a small creative elite is capable of generating sufficient innovation to grow the economy, with the remainder of the workforce continuing to engage in scripted, process-managed, uncreative work.

Based on my best understanding of innovation research, I believe that this pessimistic outcome is unlikely – because the most innovative companies are those that foster and demand innovation from all of their employees, rather than a small elite. Decades ago, many industrial-age companies had a research and development team that functioned as a creative elite; all new ideas were expected to come from this team, and the rest of the company was simply expected to execute, to follow instructions with almost no creativity required. In recent decades, this model has proven to be ineffective, and the most innovative companies have shifted to organizational designs that foster creativity throughout the organization.

To maximize innovation and knowledge generation, many societal factors must be in alignment. In closing I emphasize two: first, the broader society must foster knowledge communication and dissemination, through enhanced social networks, transportation infrastructures, and communication technologies. Second, learning must be available to all citizens throughout the lifespan, and this learning must be designed to support creative behaviour. At present, many schools (and corporate learning programmes as well) are based in an cultural model of teaching and learning that I have called the “standard model.” I have argued that the standard model does not result in learning that supports creative behaviour. Fortunately, research emerging from the learning sciences is showing how to design learning environments that result in creative learning.

I have identified a range of challenges that must be overcome before schools and other organizations can successfully redesign learning environments on learning sciences principles. For the future of creativity and innovation, it is critical that societies overcome these challenges and build creative classrooms designed for the innovation age.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.