Summary - Chapter 1: New Learning

Dimension 1: The social significance of education

• Always important in imparting basic skills and social discipline

• More important as an economic force, as a path to participation and as a means of personal enablement

• A central part of the emerging ‘knowledge society’

Dimension 2: The institutional locations of learning

• Located mainly in formal

institutions: schools, colleges and universities

• Happening more and more outside the formal institutions

• Something that happens everywhere: at work, at play, through the media; mixing formal, semi-formal and informal learning

Dimension 3: The tools of learning

• Based on tools of teacher
talk, textbooks and student workbooks

• Using a broader range of

instructional media

• Communicated in part though new media (such as the Internet and other new media) that don’t need the students to be in the classroom and ‘on the same page’

Dimension 4: The outcomes of learning

• Grounded in subject content, the things you know

• Increasingly focused on learning how to learn

• Grounded in capabilities, or the things you can do, including the capacity to find out what you don’t know

Dimension 5: The balance of agency

• A relationship
of authority in which teacher and text transmit knowledge to learners

• A relationship in which learners are more actively engaged

• A relationship in which teachers build an environment of active knowledge making by learners

Dimension 6: The significance of learner differences

• A place where one-size-fits- all curriculum seems easiest and best

• A place where differences are increasingly recognised

• A place where it is clear that effective teaching for learner differences makes a difference in outcomes

Dimension 7: The relation of the new to the old

• An institution that is quite consistent and predictable

• An institution that is challenged by the increasing variety of approaches to education

• A series of places where there are many forms of learning; new as well as revived versions of older learning approaches

Dimension 8: The professional role of the teacher

• A workplace where teachers are loyal workers who take orders and teach the curricula they are given

• A workplace where teachers are expected to take more responsibilities

• A workplace
of responsible, self-managing professionals, who are also intellectuals and social scientists