Kalantzis and Cope: A Charter for Change in Education


In this moment of tremendous change, investing in old ways of doing education is not the best way forward. In offering a Charter for Change we recognise that knowledge and learning will be pivotal to the social and personal transformations necessary to address the idiosyncratic challenges of our times.[1] The transformed economic system emerging from the current financial crisis will require human capacities that only education can nurture, based on deep knowledge, practical imagination, creative participation, intellectual inquisitiveness and collaborative commitment—not just on the part of a knowledge elite, but of the many in the labour force and in the broader society. Extending opportunity to those marginalized by poverty and discrimination over the longer run depends almost entirely on the education system, including the reduction of high school drop-out rates, increasing access to college, and introducing lifelong learning programs in community colleges for adults who have been displaced by economic globalization. Emerging digital information technologies demand greater participation than the knowledge systems of our recent past, blurring as they do the boundaries between authors and audiences, creators and consumers, knowledge makers and knowledge users. Immigration, globalism and diversity require that we nurture civic impulses based on new paradigms of self-governance for groups and, amongst individuals, mutual responsibility, despite vast variations in life experience and sensibility. Our learning systems have to be transformed to acknowledge these new demands and related changes in epistemologies and ways of being. These are the challenges addressed in this paper.

Introduction

There is widespread agreement among educators that current resources are insufficient to produce satisfactory outcomes; similarly, many economists agree that additional resources for education have a greater multiplier effect than almost other investment. However, in this moment of tremendous change, investing in old ways of doing education may not be the best way forward. This chapter begins by outlining briefly some of the different institutional and attitudinal changes which are needed, before concentrating in more depth on curricular and pedagogical questions.

The new ‘knowledge society’ is marked by a decline in the relative need for unskilled labour, and also the increasing economic significance of knowledge management systems: applied to product design, service quality, reputation, brand, business systems, product or service aesthetics, customer loyalty, intellectual property, technology use, human resource management, and, from a organizational point of view, the capacities of the enterprise to capture, systematize, preserve and apply knowledge.

This has been variously called the information society, post-Fordist production, or the post-industrial economy (Bell 1973; Touraine 1971; Stiglitz 1999; Cope and Kalantzis 1997). This is misleading, since we still need and value made things. To an unprecedented extent, however, knowledge is now mixed with the making and using of things.

In order to teach new kinds of ‘knowledgeability’, we need to prepare all to:

  • be participant-researchers or action researchers – analyzing situations, anticipating and solving problems, thinking creatively, innovating and taking well-judged risks. This means adding a cognitive reflexivity, an intellectual recursiveness to everything we do.
  • become transformative leaders of change, instead of finding ourselves in a state of ‘future shock’, responding proactively to challenges of sustainability, technological change, economic viability, diversity and globalism.
  • become good citizens, with capacities to work autonomously and collabopprative in environments of devolved responsibility, where personal agency must come with heightened senses of values
  • contribute to a productive diversity, by drawing on personal experiences, different points of view, styles of communication, and methods for addressing challenges.
  • build capacities for innovation enabling creativity, supporting well considered risk, providing spaces for the inventive spirit to flourish.

Major institutional changes will be needed, including making schools a 7 days a week, 7-11 resource; more flexible size of teaching groups; providing more flexible learning spaces; abandoning the wastefulness of teaching to the middle of the class.

Legacy notions of ‘teaching’ need to be replaced by new notions of ‘learning design’, to capture the spirit of a reflective, intellectual work culture rather than the instrumental role of teachers of the recent past, defined by narrowly delimited standards and testable outcomes. Teachers need to conceive of themselves as participant designers and action researchers, not conduits in a standards-textbook-test pipeline. They also need to move out beyond the confines of the school, making local contributions by addressing the big questions of our time in a community context. Schools can become knowledge centers for communities – sites of energetic intellectual inquiry and practical solution development.

Schools need to adapt to a ubiquitous learning environment, brought about by ICT. Most classrooms are still strikingly not a part of the information age, even in terms of students’ access to digital learning content and works spaces. Even when there is access, the curriculum content and student work practices are often unimaginatively conventional (content transmission, lock-step sequencing, standardized curriculum, discrete item assessment). Much ‘e-learning’ does not innovate in ways that the new technologies allow. Student learning results are disappointing. Yet ironically, these same technologies are having a marked and transformational impact on learning and communication outside the classroom.

Various moves are needed:

1) to blur the traditional institutional boundaries

2) to shift the balance of agency so that learners become active discoverers, recorders, reporters and publishers of knowledge

3) to use learner differences productively

4) to broaden the mix of representational modes in which students express their knowledge

5) to develop conceptualizing capacities and sophisticated forms of pattern recognition and schematization

6) to connect one’s own thinking into the social mind of distributed cognition and collective intelligence

7) top build collaborative knowledge cultures.

Teach to a New Basics

Whether well founded or not, it seems to have become a perennial complaint that education is falling behind in key areas of the ‘basics’. We have a crisis of science, mathematics and technology education. We have a crisis in literacy education. Standards are dropping. Our global competitiveness is at risk.There may indeed be a crisis, but perhaps it is at deeper orders of difficulty than anything measurable by today’s curriculum frameworks and assessment processes.

The first order of difficulty is the question of discipline boundaries and curriculum content. The basics of science, technology and mathematics have shifted in the context of new areas of fundamental intellectual and practical concern (such as nanotechnology, web informatics and environmental sustainability). The basics of literacy have shifted in the context of the deep multimodality of the new media in every aspect of our working and personal lives, mixing written language with spoken language, image, sound, gesture, touch and space. The intellectual and practical work we need to do to address the key challenges of our times take us beyond the disciplines as they have been historically conceived. We cannot simply keep teaching the things we have always taught within the traditional subject areas and expect our teaching to remain relevant.

But there is a second fundamental problem, a problem of an even greater order of difficulty, and that is a change in the epistemological bases of the basics, a transformation in the social conditions of knowing. Top-down systems of knowledge authority and application are in many places rapidly being replaced by the more grounded and dialogical systems of knowledge-producing communities. Whether it be product and market research in workplaces, or learning design in schools, or clinical knowledge management in hospitals, or environmental policies and practices by local governments, or community outreach initiatives to diverse communities in non-profit organizations, a new bottom-up knowledge making energy is needed today. Persons and groups use available knowledge resources, for sure, in the form of multiple sources of fact and concept which require critical analysis and interpretation. Then they reframe, rework, redesign, recalibrate, reapply then recirculate these ideas based on the subtleties of local experience and practicalities of application. Every worker and every community member is becoming a knowledge producer. Or that should be our program of action (Kalantzis 2006).

Add to this a generational factor, the rise of a new Generation P, for ‘participatory’ (Gee 2003; 2004; 2005; Jenkins 2006a; 2006b; Haythornthwaite 2009). Here we will just consider the example of young people living in new media environments. Not simply vicarious viewers of movies, they play computer games in which they are the central character and in which their actions and identities in part determine narrative outcomes. Not simply listeners to the top forty songs on a radio station’s play list, they create their own playlists on their personal listening devices. Not simply consumers of broadcast television, they choose amongst thousands of television channels and millions of YouTube clips; they even choose their own viewing angles on interactive TV or make their own television programs and upload them to the web. Not simply readers, today’s literacy experiences as often as not also position readers at the same time as writers—in wikis, or blogs or their Facebook and MySpace pages, or small messaging spaces such as SMS or Twitter. Not simply consumers of pre-packed products, they become ‘prosumers’ of products which allow customization and even consumer contribution to the shape of the product for other consumers. Traditional relationships of knowledge and culture are profoundly disrupted, and even the terms of the either/or differentiations we have hitherto used to describe these relationships: creator/audience, producer/consumer, writer/reader. The key to these changes is an intensified cognitive and practical input on the part of previously more passive recipients of culture and knowledge, a shift in the fundamental direction of the flows of knowledge and culture, a transformation in the balance of creative and epistemic agency.

For better or for worse, Generation ‘P’ represents a new kind of person, a person who will be less comfortable with the relations of cultural command and compliance that underlay the old, didactic education. We have in our classes today a generation of young people who will be bored and frustrated by learning environments that fail to engage every fiber of their intellectual and active capacities. If we don’t rework our pedagogies, we are in all probability going to find we have increasing discipline problems and ‘attention deficits’—diseases that may reach plague proportions, in need of drastic social epidemiology.

So, what do we need to do to order this order of challenge? What are the new basics stated in terms of the kind of person who can live a good life in the changing social conditions of the unfolding future? What will be their dispositions, sensibilities, stance? How will they navigate change, take responsibility, solve problems, negotiate differences, resolve conflicts, think creatively, act innovatively, take well measured risks, learn-as-they-go, collaborate, be flexible?[3]

Create More Responsive Learning Feedback Systems

Education, people often say, easily falls prey to purportedly cure-all fads, singular interventions which are supposed to have miraculous general effects. If one were to go through the fads of recent times, test-driven accountability stands out as perhaps the most widely promoted and tried educational solution.[4]

Having reached new heights since the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the limitations of test-based accountability are now well documented (Ryan and Shepard eds. 2008; McGuinn 2006; Sunderman et al. 2005; Abernathy 2007). Ideally tests are no more than a few hours long and machine readable. The logistics of their form are such that they tend to measure discrete knowledge items distilled to clear-cut and isolable facts and aphorisms drawn from theories, and specifically items that can be adjudged right or wrong. These may not be the best things to be measuring in an era when the questions are at times complex and ambiguous, facts contestable, and theories open to interpretation. Testing what is readily testable has also produced a narrowing of the curriculum—to the receptive capacities of reading comprehension, for instance, more than the productive capacities of writing which are harder and more expensive to test (an irony in times when more people are writing and writing more). Today’s tests, moreover, mostly require memory work, when we live an era of at-your-fingertips mnemonics, where you can readily reach for empirical answers, definitions of concepts and representations of causality. They are individualistic when cognition is increasingly distributed and intelligence collective (learning organizations, knowledge management, communities of practice). They have a cognitivist ‘what’s-in-your-head’ bias when learning today is a matter of melding conceptualization with practical demonstration, analysis with application, experience with theorization. They represent an end-of-the-production line, quality control model of evaluation when they should more usefully provide constant, formative feedback oriented to continuous learner improvement. They represent a taxation model of accountability, where activity is measured in increments of evenly spaced time and outcomes can be reduced to a numerical bottom line—when, in fact, much of the most important learning occurs in shorter or longer timeframes and the outcomes are utilities, not numbers or grades. Indeed, the tests we have today, more than anything else, test for the tricks and tropes of tests, how well you can play this strange, other-worldly game of second-guessing the answers that will give you the best score.

Our testing and accountability system is in need of radical reform. Here are a few things we could work on:

We need to test more for learning, in addition to accountability. Testing should help learners and make them want to learn more, instead of serving primarily as a punitive/reward end-of-program measure. We have focused on summative assessment for accountability in recent years at the expense of formative assessment. We don’t do formative assessment much at all, and rarely in a way which is directly useful to and encouraging for learners.

We need assessment which provides day-to-day information, useful to and immediately useable by learners and teachers—feedback loops integrated into curriculum, curriculum designed to incorporate incremental assessment where there are no learning activities without feedback systematically built in.

We need to measure complex performances (a scientific experiment, making a short video, reporting on a community controversy) as readily as we measure things we think we can break into discrete, unambiguous facts and definitive theoretical aphorisms.

We need assessments which are ‘open book’, measuring not what you know but how you find out.

We need to ways to measure collaborative learning, not just of the whole group but providing multiple perspectives upon, and evidence of, differential contribution.

We need to abandon the sporting logic of results distribution in which there have to be losers in order for there to be winners, where necessarily, by fiat of statistical distribution, some must fail in order for others (relatively) to succeed. What if we were to set our objectives at universal success, or personalized achievement of customized learning outcomes?

We need to change the motivational structure of assessments, whether that be the anxieties and fears of failing for the learner, or the failure to meet average yearly test progress on the part of a school.

We need to move away from judgmental feedback (most peremptorily reduced to a grade) to constructive feedback on learning work, from the idea that intellectual works are ever finished to the idea that can always considered to be works-in-progress, that feedback can always be used for clarification, or improvement, or elaboration, or extension.

We need to provide digital portfolio spaces which show what a learner actually did. This can speak for itself to those who want or need to know, and much more powerfully at times than bald grades.

We need to create learning and assessment environments which in their core design provide multiple sources of assessment feedback—self, peer, teacher, critical friend, parent—with metamoderation loops and reviewer ratings that reward useful feedback by weighting raters. Today’s social networking technologies make this easily achievable—in fact, rating and commentary is an integral part of the new, participatory media. This adds sociability to assessment for learning, in contrast to the lonely isolation of the traditional test. It also creates an additional, lateral axis of evaluation rather than the traditional, unidirectionally vertical axis—where assessable content is passed up to the audience of one, the assessor-teacher-judge. This also creates a sense that students are working in and for a knowledge and learning community.

We need to automate some aspects of feedback and assessment by developing as-yet-barely realized potentials of learners working in digital spaces, including natural language processing mechanisms, domain-defined semantic tagging, and machine learning algorithms which read in progressively more intelligent ways the noisy data of learning engagement.

We need a new psychometrics, capable of reading multiple sources of data on student learning—social and automated—and interpreting this across time (individual or cohort progress) and between demographically definable groups.

If we were to do any or all of these things, we would in fact be doing more testing than ever, but doing it better and more usefully.[5] Our education would be more accountable and more transparent.

Meet the Needs of Diverse Learners

The melting pot of the historical imagination offered everyone the same opportunity to social mobility through education. Mobility was the reward promised to students who met its universal and uniform educational standards.

Despite its rhetoric, this system failed in practice to provide opportunities equitably.[6] In a new civic era, such failure is no longer acceptable. The rhetoric must now to be taken at its word, not only by virtue of civil rights, but also for the most pragmatic of economic reasons—the growing cost of a long tail of failure measured against the more ambitious opportunities in the ‘knowledge economy’. That is, inequality in access to good quality education is contributing to rising inequality of income (Education Equality Project 2008; Ladd et al 2007).

For practical as well as principled reasons, you don’t have to be the same to be equal. This is democracy’s new promise, after civil rights, after the rise of identity politics, after multiculturalism, after globalization.

What are the variables of human difference to be negotiated in communities, in product and service relationships, through the hugely diversified new media, and in schools? The gross demographic categories immediately tell us of differences which are principally material (socio-economic class, locale, family circumstances), corporeal (age, race, sex, sexuality, and physical and mental abilities) and symbolic (culture, language, gender, identity) (Kalantzis and Cope 2008). These differences intersect in unique ways in individuals. We become ever more aware of their significance and sensitive to their nuances.

However, for the oversimplifications of such categorization, the overgeneralizations about uniform life experience within groups, and their unreliable prediction of need, these demographics also often let us down. How do we identify learners who are at risk? How do we read their trajectories and customize learning programs which meet their needs? How do we enhance equality of educational opportunity by treating people differently in carefully calibrated ways? How do we look outside the educational system to see who is being left out and why?

To do any of these things, we need to bring underlying dimensions of deep diversity into the analysis, by connecting directly with life narratives (experiences, networks and places of belonging), by negotiating varied personae (affinities, attachments, orientations, interests, stances, values, worldviews, dispositions and sensibilities) and by addressing divergent styles (epistemological, discursive, interpersonal and learning styles).

This requires a revolution in pedagogy, escaping at last the baleful dominance in the twentieth century of all things mass—mass markets, mass culture, mass society, mass education. In schools, instead of common curriculum and one-size-fits-all teaching, we need customized learning aimed at equivalent or comparable, but not necessarily the same, outcomes. To achieve this we need pedagogies which actively and consciously bring learner knowledge and experiences into the classroom, and which then involve collaborative learning amongst students, drawing upon these differences as a resource. No longer must every student be on the same page at the same time. One-size-fit-all education is particularly inexcusable in the digital era when customized learning designs can be so easily be recorded, and stored, shared amongst teachers, and delivered directly to one student at a time. These are just a couple of examples of a curriculum reorientation away from standardization for uniformity and towards customization for diversity.

Educate for Global and Local Citizenship[7]

Too often, our teaching and learning is narrowly local. We fail to teach adequately for a world of global interconnectedness. In the context of globalization, new ways of thinking about curriculum have become necessary. This is so because education now needs to pay greater attention to how it uniquely spans the cultural, economic and interpersonal dimensions of global relations. Schools and colleges need to recognize their transformative power, and their capacity to become responsive to contemporary global changes. The context in which education now occurs has been re-shaped by globalization.

Much has been said and written in recent years about globalization. Some of it is hype. But a great deal of it is seeking to understand the profound global changes are helping to integrate the world into one extensive social and economic system. Recent developments in information and communication technologies, for example, involve knowledge production and exchange that defy traditional boundaries. This has resulted in a major shift towards international integration of products and markets. National institutions are still significant in the global environment but now must become engaged in the global processes or face obsolescence. International competition and technological change is associated with a workplace that is more integrated and more devolved, and requires higher levels of cognitive and communication skills. The post-Fordist vision of flatter organizational structures demands higher level of participation, strong teams, multi-skilling and life-long learning. The future of work is increasingly shaped by technology, the capacity of labor and change management in an international context. Competitive international advantage is determined by capacity for continuous innovation and by a workplace culture that is self- and skill- reflective; that is, a workplace in which workers can put into practice their own judgments about the skills and knowledge they require in order to meet the needs of technology and competition.

The contemporary context is also characterized by the changing global knowledge economy. Among other features this includes: an exponential increase in the amount of internationally distributed and globally accessible knowledge; wider dispersal of the centers of knowledge creation; a huge development in globally focused knowledge-mediated industries and services; changes in the access to and control over knowledge on a global scale; and the emergence of new ways of thinking about the links between knowledge and innovation. The traditional links between knowledge and culture are also changing, with a greater recognition that knowledge creation and use is mediated by cultures. The changing nature of the knowledge economy involves an intricate global- local relationship. It suggests that the nature of knowledge use and innovation demands a simultaneous engagement with local factors as well as global processes. This is so because in cultural terms the local is now re-shaped globally, and because the idea of global is meaningless without its local references.

These large trends highlight the importance of looking at globalization through the lens of the changing nature of social relations its spawns. In the new context, the changing boundaries of nationhood, geography and identity become fluid and shifting. The changes that we now experience come partly from increasing exposure to cultural diversity through the influences of international news and media, information and communication technologies and consumer products as well as greater personal and employment mobility. These increases in cultural globalization are experienced as pressure towards both heterogeneity and homogeneity at the same time, a resurgence of localized cultural identities as well as the development of globalised cultural practices. The global context is defined by a language that highlights cultural aspects of economic relations, and the need to develop products that are responsive to local needs, values and traditions.

In terms of these considerations, one possible definition of the internationalization of education is to view it as both an expression of and response to the processes of globalization. However, the relationship between what might be viewed as the global context and educational goals is not a simple one. This is so because what is seen as –’the context’ is never self-evident, but always requires interpretation. Descriptions of global processes are highly contested, as are the suggestions about how best to explain them, respond to them, react to them or indeed to use them for our competitive advantage. The questions we might ask about the implications of globalization are often as complex and as pertinent as the possible answers. In terms of the internationalization of curriculum, this suggests a curriculum approach that seeks to provide students with skills of inquiry and analysis rather than a set of facts about globalization. Since we are confronted a fast-changing knowledge economy, students need to develop questioning skills so that they are able to identify the sources of knowledge, assess claims of its validity and legitimacy, examine its local relevance and significance, determine its uses and applications and speculate about how it might be challenged and refuted. The ability to think reflectively and critically about knowledge creation and use requires a form of global imagination; the capacity to determine how knowledge is globally linked, no matter how locally specific its uses (Rizvi and Lingard 2009).

Educate for Sustainability[8]

During the last thirty years, environmental education has acquired an increasing influence over the design of educational and environmental public policies on both the nation and international level.[9] Over this time, environmental education has contributed to the strengthening of the curriculum in a range of areas including biology, social studies, economics, business studies and health education.

However, as environmental education became established a great variety of viewpoints from different schools of thought and action emerged, representing at times conflicting interests. Environmental education is a poly-discursive field whose significance today is demonstrated in terms of current policies of sustainability, energy efficiency and conservation. Environmental education has much to contribute to the process of establishing new social identities in response to the challenges of these difficult times because, as this new field of learning becomes established, it is increasingly distanced from the original proposals for an environmental education coupled with naturalism, conservationism and other movements that place importance on preserving the environment without taking into account the needs and expectations for social change of human groups that live both in natural and urban environments.

Today’s context requires a renewal of the commitment to science and to science-based environment-policy with education curricula and pedagogies designed to raise awareness of environmental issues (protected areas, preservation of species, climate change etc.), sustainability policies and what they mean for U.S. business, industry and public life.

In particular, in the K-12 system a new emphasis on environmental education must accord with the emphasis of the Obama administration on sustainability in energy policy and its relationship to environmental issues, especially new policies aimed at new energy efficiencies and the development of new alternative and renewable energy resources (González-Gaudiano 2005). One of the principal difficulties is that the older conception of environmental education has been substituted and replaced by ‘sustainable development’ and increasingly given ground to prevailing models of economic development. This is consistent with a quest to find market solutions to the world’s environmental problems, such as emissions trading, where sustainability is driven by a new market rationalism. However, such apparently straightforward solutions may at times be at variance with the ecological complexity of living organisms – the biota – and its major organizing principle of the network. The assumptions of individuality, rationality and self-interest at the heart of Homo economicus are called into question in relation to the environment – natural, social or informational – especially in relation to ‘the commons’ and the complex biota of the planet considered over timescales and cycles outside the natural human lifespan.

The complexities of our times point to a pressing need for the renewal of environmental education in schools and universities that promotes, enhances, and develops forms of understanding, identity and citizenship consonant with the new emphasis on investment in clean energy, green jobs, and green technologies, as well as a more embracing stewardship of the earth. There is a need also for an understanding of the sweeping theoretical and practical shifts in environmental education, public policy and ethics—from anthropocentrism to systems thinking, from industrial capitalism to Green Capitalism 2.0, and from a dependent oil-hungry based economy to an efficient, self-sufficient, renewal and green energy system.

Conclusions

Whichever way we look, we see enormous challenges in areas of critical concern for our future. The seemingly stable pillars of our economic system, from Wall Street to Detroit, have suddenly shown themselves to be less sturdy than we had thought. We face a crisis of sustainability in the way we use the earth’s natural resources, from transportation, to our food and water supplies, to industry, to our homes. New technologies profoundly disrupt old ways of working and modes of life, change that extends from the traditional culture and knowledge industries to our most intimate private and civic lives. Mass movements of people are crossing borders in search of work and a better life, movements which have accelerated in recent decades and show no signs of slowing down. The palpable forces of globalism challenge us to recognize threats and opportunities at the ends of the earth that are simultaneously local threats and opportunities. Human diversity becomes more insistent in every aspect of life, whether we are negotiating differences in our organizations, communities or nations. These are just a few of the deep practical challenges today’s generations face and must address for the sake of future generations.

As educators, we are used to being responsive to such circumstances. In fact, we find ourselves adapting all the time. The challenges we face today, however, are so large that they demand more than an adaptive response. They require we take a role amongst and alongside society’s leaders.

Why? Because knowledge and learning will be pivotal to the social and personal transformations required to address the peculiar challenges of our times. The transformed economic system emerging from the current crisis will require human capacities that only education can nurture, based on deep knowledge, practical imagination, creative participation, intellectual inquisitiveness and collaborative commitment—not just on the part of a knowledge elite whose members are deemed to be leaders, but of the many in the labor force and in the broader society. Extending opportunity to those marginalized by poverty and historic discrimination over the longer run depends almost entirely on the education system, including the reduction of high school drop out rates, increasing access to college, and lifelong learning programs in community colleges for adults who have been displaced by globalization. Emerging digital information technologies already invite, indeed even at times demand, greater participation than the knowledge systems and cultural environments of our recent past, blurring as they do the boundaries between authors and audiences, creators and consumers, knowledge makers and knowledge users. Immigration, globalism and diversity require that we nurture civic impulses based on new paradigms of self-governance for groups and, amongst individuals, mutual responsibility despite vast variations in life experience and sensibility.

Where better to begin realizing the momentous opportunities of our times than in and through our learning environments? This is a transformational moment that needs transformational education.

Education is a process of self-transformation which enables a person to negotiate changes that are as-yet-indeterminate as well as the changes that must surely come. Historically, the simplest measure of personal transformation was intergenerational—succeeding generations doing better in economic or social terms than their predecessors. That fundamental role for education remains. In fact, it becomes all the more pressing in a time of economic turbulence and material distress.

As educators and in these times, it is also incumbent upon us to participate in transformations in our learners which are more than personal. Education is a laboratory of and for society. It is a ‘sandpit’ for exploring the range of possible thoughts and actions. This is where its most profoundly transformational possibilities lie, and where its constructive potentials in this moment of deep disruption can most ambitiously and most pragmatically be deployed.

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Cope, B. and M. Kalantzis (2009a). “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning.” Pedagogies: An International Journal 4: 164-195;

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[1] We began to develop the ideas in this chapter when Mary was President of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. With the support and assistance of the Council, we created a Charter document in order to provide a focus for lobbying the Australian Government in support of educational reform: See Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, “New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education,” Canberra: Australian Council of Deans of Education, 2001, and the subsequent update Mary Kalantzis and Andrew Harvey, “New Teaching, New Learning: A Vision for Australian Education,” Canberra: Australian Council of Deans of Education, 2004. We moved to the US at a point when the problems of the Bush reform agenda for schools, ‘No Child Left Behind’, were beginning to stand out. In the context of the 2008 presidential election, we brought together 35 experts in the place we now work, the College of Education at the University of Illinois, to imagine what kinds of educational reform we might recommend. This chapters draws particularly on action areas 5-9 of this charter project. A full version of the charter can be found at http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/ This is a site of dialogue, where educators are very much welcomed join the online discussion.

[2] Professor Bill Cope is in Education at the University of Illionos, Urbana-Champagn, e-mail:

[3]For concrete suggestions in the form of Action Items and Supporting evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/new-basics.html

[4] For Supporting Evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/learning-feedback-systems.html

[5] See, for instance, http://assess-as-you-go.com

[6] For Supporting Evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/diverse-learners.html

[7] This Action Area was written by Fazal Rizvi; visit http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/global-citizenship.html for Supporting Evidence.

[8] This Action Area was written by Michael Peters; for Supporting Evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/sustainability.html

[9] This material draws upon the Introduction to González-Gaudiano and Peters eds