Effective learning environments engage with learner diversity.
Learning is about transformation, and transformation is the basis of enhanced learner performance. Effective learning takes the learner on a journey into new and unfamiliar terrains. However, for learning to occur the journey into the unfamiliar needs to extend from a zone of intelligibility and safety.
At each step, it needs to travel just the right distance from the learner’s lifeworld starting point.
Learners today need to use a variety of kinaesthetic meaning making resources (written, oral, visual, audio, gestural, tactile and spatial resources of Multiliteracies.
Teaching and learning choices (pedagogy) need to be made explicit, pathways planned, and performance clearly tracked.
The L-by-D project is premised on the notion that children have diverse learning needs and ways of knowing and that these are vastly different from their parents and grandparents. In an era of ubiquitous technology there is a need for children to make sense of a multiplicity of communication channels, media types and technologies.
Children today need to make meaning of an increasingly complex and clamorous multimodal world. This has led the project team to question current curricula priorities and pedagogical choices.
Learning-by-Design is about creating the necessary conditions for learning - about a need for belonging and transformation.
In the context of the L-by-D project pedagogy entails eight distinct ‘knowledge processes’. Teachers use these as prompts to design, document and deploy their learning programs. We call the mindful and considered use of these knowledge processes ‘learning-by-design’; in this context the teacher becomes a reflective designer of learning experiences (teacher-as-designer); and classroom plans become shareable ‘designs-for-learning’.
Mindful and appropriate deployment of the range of knowledge processes is intended to foster higher order thinking skills and deeper learning.