Innovation in education is the passionate pursuit of the UK-based organization Futurelab. Their bi-annual magazine, VISION, offers possibilities about the future of learning via digital technologies. Futurelab's newsletter is one I regularly dive into when I need to get some perspective. One of the best ways to anticipate future developments in any area of society/culture is to evaluate what's happening in areas other than the one central to your focus. Cross-disciplinary approaches prevent myopia. Assessing what's happening in business, education and science gives us perspective about the Church.
Check out this excerpt from an article in the current VISION entitled: The new basics: changing curriculum for 21st century skills regarding the future of education. Is it just me or can you replace "school curriculum" with "church mission statement"?
"…..There are signs that this type of thinking is becoming the 'new common sense' about curriculum, and is reflected in various initiatives to reform the school curriculum. An example is the RSA's curriculum Opening Minds: Education for the 21st Century (www.rsa.org.uk/newcurriculum). Opening Minds challenges current curriculum and teaching and learning practices, and makes suggestions about what an alternative school curriculum might look like. It starts from the assumption that there is a growing divide between the current school curriculum and the experiences and demands of the outside world - Opening Minds argues that it is not a matter of changing ways of teaching but about the content of the curriculum, which it argues is fundamentally out of date, slow to react, fragmented and ill-suited to children's needs.
The Opening Minds curriculum recommends the abandonment of subject areas and their replacement by a set of competences that students will acquire through a range of experiences. The focus is on understanding and doing rather than acquiring a body of knowledge. It makes use of new technologies to promote flexible learning and teaching styles and the release of creative energy - in other words, it promotes independent rather than 'receptive' learning."
Wow! I'm so tempted to quote a bunch of scriptures here but I'm gonna let you do it instead. Ok, just one:
But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. James 1:22 - 24
Your turn scholars…
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I think it’s all about being a good mirror and knowing what you are looking at!