Change

Photo by Steve Wheeler

I took my 90-year-old father and 88-year-old mother out for a drive around their home town of Plymouth yesterday. It was a small treat to celebrate their 67th Wedding Anniversary, and they really enjoyed their outing. They gazed out through the windows as the city passed by, and gave me a continual commentary on their memories. Mum and Dad's main remarks were around how the town had changed drastically since their last excursion (they don't get out much these days). Their trip down memory lane (or in this case, many lanes, streets, roads and avenues) was interesting because they were able to tell me what each street looked like when they were in their childhood during the war years.

Plymouth was heavily bombed during the Blitz, and many streets were devastated, and were demolished. Some are now completely unrecognisable from those years, because entire neighbourhoods have been rebuilt (and rebuilt again) over the years, some with large housing estates, and others like the city centre, with high rise buildings such as the one pictured (Beckley Point is a newly opened 23 story student accommodation block across the road from the University campus).

For Mum and Dad, the changes have seemed sudden, mainly because they have not visited the city centre regularly in recent years. Their memories of Plymouth go back to the 1930s and 1940s, and these are still vivid for them. I'm in town just about every day and the changes for me have been gradual, but for Mum and Dad, it was a shock to see the many radical changes that have been made since their last visit.

I got to thinking - perhaps it's a little like that in education. Those of us who have worked in education recently probably don't recognise all of the drastic changes that have been made in the last two or three decades. Education in some ways is probably unrecognisable from the 70s and 80s. Someone who left school during this time may visit a school or a university today and be surprised by how much it has changed.

Children no longer tend to sit in rows while listening to a teacher at the front of the classroom talking from a blackboard. Most schools today have clusters of tables where a lot of collaborative work and active learning takes place. The teacher tends to move around the room, dealing with individual needs and the children are involved in project work and challenge based learning. There are classroom assistants too, and some are very specialised in their classroom input. Assessment is beginning to change too (although in some places not as quickly as we would wish). Tests and exams still exist, but children's learning is now also measured through continuous assessment, and teaching is differentiated according to student abilities. Most children with special and additional needs are catered for within the mainstream setting, instead of being separated out into 'special schools'. None of this happened in the 1960s and 70s.

In universities, change is less evident, but nevertheless it is there. Students still tend to sit in rows and raked theatres, listening to their lecturers in large auditoriums and lecture theatres just as they did in the 1960s. Well, they do when the cohorts are very large. When they are in smaller groups, students tend to work together to solve problems, create their own content, or learn in situated contexts that relate to the profession they will eventually be joining. Although learning is still assessed through examinations, there is also a lot more project work, and assignments can be submitted electronically. Digital media are now common place, and students and staff communicate through email, Learning Management Systems and social media. Access to knowledge is ubiquitous, through online resources and networks. Computer power is no longer confined to specific rooms, where you need to book time. Now it is everywhere, because students carry it around in their pockets. This kind of access to powerful computing enables and encourages new forms of learning. Again, none of this was available to students in the 1960s.

Education is changing, but those of us who are on the inside tend not to notice because we are so close to it. Those outside however, would probably be quite surprised if they returned to schools several decades after they left. Change is relative to the observer.

How do you view this? Let me know your thoughts in the comments box below!


Change by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.