essay about the transformation of education begins with teachers

In the quest to transform education, putting purpose at the center is key

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, emily markovich morris and emily markovich morris fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education ghulam omar qargha ghulam omar qargha fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education.

February 16, 2023

This commentary is the first of a three-part series on (1) why it is important to define the purpose of education, (2) how historical forces have interacted to shape the purposes of today’s modern schooling systems , and (3) the role of power in reshaping how the purpose of school is taken up by global education actors in policy and practice .

Education systems transformation is creating buzz among educators, policymakers, researchers, and families. For the first time, the U.N. secretary general convened the Transforming Education Summit around the subject in 2022. In tandem, UNESCO, UNESCO Institute for Statistics, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) co-authored “ From Learning Recovery to Education Transformation ” to lay a roadmap for how to move from COVID-19 school closures to systems change. Donor institutions like the Global Partnership for Education’s most recent strategy centers on systems transformation, and groups like the Global Campaign for Education are advocating for broader public engagement on transformative education. 

Unless we anchor ourselves and define where we are coming from and where we want to go as societies and institutions, discussions on systems transformation will continue to be circuitous and contentious.  

What is missing from the larger discussion on systems transformation is an intentional and candid dialogue on how societies and institutions are defining the purpose of education. When the topic is discussed, it often misses the mark or proposes an intervention that takes for granted that there is a shared purpose among policymakers, educators, families, students, and other actors. For example, the current global focus on foundational learning is not a purpose unto itself but rather a mechanism for serving a greater purpose — whether for economic development, national identity formation, and/or supporting improved well-being.   

The Role of Purpose in Systems Transformation   

The purpose of education has sparked many conversations over the centuries. In 1930, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her essay in Pictorial Review , “What is the purpose of education? This question agitates scholars, teachers, statesmen, every group, in fact, of thoughtful men and women.”  She argues that education is critical for building “good citizenship.” As Martin Luther King, Jr. urged in his 1947 essay, “ The Purpose of Education ,” education transmits “not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.” King urged us to see the purpose of education as a social and political struggle as much as a philosophical one.   

In contemporary conversations, the purpose of education is often classified in terms of the individual and social benefits—such personal, cultural, economic, and social purposes or individual/social possibility and individual/social efficiency . However, when countries and communities define the purpose, it needs to be an intentional part of the transformation process. As laid out in the Center for Universal Education’s (CUE’s) policy brief “ Transforming Education Systems: Why, What, and How ,” defining and deconstructing assumptions is critical to building a “broadly shared vision and purpose” of education.   

Education and the Sustainable Development Goals  

Underlying all the different purposes of education lies the foundational framing of education as a human right in the Sustainable Development Goals. People of all races, ethnicities, gender identities, abilities, languages, religions, socio-economic status, and national or social origins have the right to an education as affirmed in Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights . This legal framework has fueled the education for all movement and civil rights movements around the world, alongside the Convention of the Rights of the Child of 1989 , which further protects children’s rights to a quality, safe, and equitable education. Defending people’s right to education regardless of how they will use their education helps keep us from losing sight of why we are having these conversations.   

Themes in education from the Sustainable Development Goals cross multiple purposes. For example, lifelong learning and environmental education are two key areas that extend across purposes. Lifelong learning emphasizes that education extends across age groups, education levels, modalities, and geographies. In some contexts, lifelong learning can be professional growth for economic development, but it can also be practice for spiritual growth. Similarly, environmental education may be taught as sustainable development or the balance among economic, social, and environmental protections through well-being and flourishing — or taught through a perspective of culturally sustaining practices influenced by Indigenous philosophies in education.   

Five Key Purposes of Education  

The purposes of education overlap and intersect, but pulling them apart helps us interrogate the dominant ways of framing education in the larger ecosystem and to draw attention to those that receive less attention. Categories also help us move from very philosophical and academic conversations into practical discussions that educators, learners, and families can join. Although these five categories do not do justice to the complexity of the conversation, they are a start.   

• Education for economic development is the idea that learners pursue an education to eventually obtain work or to improve the quality, safety, or earnings of their current work. This purpose is the most dominant framing used by education systems around the world and part of the agenda to modernize and develop societies according to different stages of economic growth . This economic purpose is rooted in the human capital theory, which poses that the more schooling a person completes, the higher their income, wages, or productivity ( Aslam & Rawal, 2015; Berman, 2022 ). Higher individual earnings lead to greater household income and eventually higher national economic growth. In addition to the World Bank , global institutions like the United States Agency for International Development and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development often position education primarily in relation to economic development. The promise of education as a key to social mobility and helping individuals and communities improve their economic circumstances also falls under this purpose ( World Economic Forum ).   
• Education for building national identities and civic engagement positions education as an important conduit for promoting national, community, or other identities. With the emergence of modern states, education became a key tool for building national identity — and in some contexts , also democratic citizenship as demonstrated in Eleanor Roosevelt’s essay; this motivation continues to be a primary purpose in many localities ( Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016 ). Today this purpose is heavily influenced by human right s education — or the teaching and learning of — as well as peace education, to “sustain a just and equitable peace and world” ( Bajaj & Hantzopoulus, 2016, p. 1 ). This purpose is foundational to civics and citizenship education and international exchange programming focused on building global citizenship to name a few.  
• Education as liberation and critical conscientization looks at the centrality of education in confronting and redressing different forms of structural oppression. Martin Luther King wrote about the purpose of education “to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.” Educator and philosopher Paolo Freire wrote extensively about the importance of education in developing a critical consciousness and awareness of the roots of oppression, and in identifying opportunities to challenge and transform this oppression through action. Critical race, gender , disabilities, and other theories in education further examine the ways education reproduces multiple and intersectional subordinations , but also how teaching and learning has the power to redress oppression through cultural and social transformation. As liberatory and critical educator, bell hooks wrote, “To educate as a practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn” ( hooks, 1994, p. 13 ). Efforts to teach social justice and equity—from racial literacy to gender equity—often draw on this purpose.   
• Education for well-being and flourishing emphasizes how learning is fundamental to building thriving people and communities. Although economic well-being is a component of this purpose, it is not the only purpose—rather social, emotional, physical and mental, spiritual and other forms of well-being are also privileged. Amartya Sen’s  and Martha Nussbaum’s work on well-being and capabilities have greatly informed this purpose. They argue that individuals and communities must define education in ways that they have reason to value beyond just an economic end. The Flourish Project has been developing and advocating an ecological model for helping understand and map these different types of well-being. Vital to this purpose are also social and emotional learning efforts that support children and youth in acquiring knowledge, attitudes, and skills critical to positive mental and emotional health, relationships with others, among other areas ( CASEL, 2018 ; EASEL Lab, 2023 ).  
• Education as culturally and spiritually sustaining is one of the purposes that receives insufficient attention in global education conversations. This purpose is critical to the past, present, and future field of education and emphasizes building relationships to oneself and one’s land and environment, culture, community, and faith. Centered in Indigenous philosophies in education , this purpose encompasses sustaining cultural knowledges often disregarded and displaced by modern schooling efforts. Borrowing from Django Paris’s concept of “culturally sustaining pedagogy , ” the purpose of teaching and learning goes beyond “building bridges” among the home, community, and school and instead brings together the learning practices that happen in these different domains.  Similarly neglected in the discourse is the purpose of education for spiritual and religious development, which can be intertwined with Indigenous pedagogies , as well as education for liberation, and education for well-being and flourishing. Examples include the Hibbert Lectures of 1965 , which argue that Christian values should guide the purposes of education, and scholars of Islamic education who delve into the purposes of education in the Muslim world. Indigenous pedagogies, as well as spiritual and religious teaching , predate modern school movements, yet this undercurrent of moral, religious, character, and spiritual purposes of education is still alive in much of the world.  

Beyond the Buzz   

The way we define the purpose of education is heavily influenced by our experiences, as well as those of our families, communities, and societies. The underlying philosophies of education that are presented both influence our education systems and are influenced by our education systems. Unless we anchor ourselves and define where we are coming from and where we want to go as societies and institutions, discussions on systems transformation will continue to be circuitous and contentious. We will continue to focus on upgrading and changing standards, competencies, content, and practices without looking at why education matters. We will continue to fight over the place of climate change education, critical race theory, socio-emotional learning, and religious learning in our schools without understanding the ways each of these fits into the larger education ecosystem.   

The intent of this blog is not to box education into finite purposes, but to remind us in the quest for systems transformation that there are multiple ways to see the purpose of education. Taking time to dig into the philosophies, histories, and complexities behind these purposes will help us ensure that we are headed toward transformation and not just adding to the buzz.   

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World Teachers’ Day 2022: “The transformation of education begins with teachers”

7 october, 2022 hora: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm.

In 2022, the celebrations of  World Teachers’ Day   will focus on the theme “The transformation of education begins with teachers”.

The official celebration event will be opened by Ms Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education, followed by statements from the representatives of the Co-Convening Partners: the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNICEF, and Education International (EI).

World Teachers’ Day 2022 at UNESCO Headquarters will include the awarding ceremony of the UNESCO-Hamdan Prize for Teacher Development and a series of other in-person and online events.

On October 7, 2022, from 14h00 to 15h30 (GMT -2) , UNESCO IESALC Director, Francesc Pedró , will participate in the online panel “25th Anniversary of UNESCO’s Recommendation concerning the status of higher education teaching personnel”. Pedró will discuss the impact of the hybridization of higher education in terms of the working conditions of academic staff and the stratification of the teaching profession along a research-non-research/teaching-only line.

The meeting is convened by UNESCO in partnership with the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNICEF, and Education International (EI), supported by the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030.

Interpretation will be available.

Panel registration : “25th Anniversary of UNESCO’s Recommendation concerning the status of higher education teaching personnel” . 

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Transforming education starts with a new deal for teachers

Education International brought the voice of teachers and education support personnel everywhere to the Transforming Education Pre-Summit hosted by UNESCO in Paris from June 28 to 30.

The Pre-Summit brought together education ministers and vice-ministers from 154 countries and nearly 2000 participants. It aimed to energise global action on education in the lead-up to the Transforming Education Summit, which will take place on September 19 in New York City. Convened by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, the Transforming Education Summit will bring together heads of state from around the world in order to mobilise political ambition, actions, solutions, and solidarity to accelerate progress on Sustainable Development Goal 4 on quality education for all .

It will be the first time global leaders come together to focus on education, a sector severely affected by pandemic-related learning losses, deepened and exacerbated inequities, and cuts to education budgets globally.

“The Summit gives us the opportunity to build resilient education systems capable of delivering the quality inclusive education our students have a right to and deserve. Teachers are central to these systems. Governments must invest in teachers and ensure decent working conditions to end the teacher shortage. They must involve teachers in policy decisions through social dialogue. And they must trust teachers and respect their professional autonomy. Transforming education starts with a new deal for teachers.”

Summit discussions are centred around five action tracks identified as preconditions for progress on Sustainable Development Goal 4 and essential to transforming education systems. Country commitments and initiatives are encouraged in these areas:

• Equitable, safe, and healthy schools
• Learning and skills for life, work, and sustainable development
• Teachers, teaching, and the teaching profession
• Digital learning
• Education financing (domestic and international)

A new deal for teachers

📢 Transforming education starts with a new deal for teachers! This week, we are taking this message from the world's educators to the @UN #TransformingEducation Pre-Summit in Paris. ℹ️ https://t.co/Pqk6CmGbIX #InvestInTeachers #StudentsBeforeProfit pic.twitter.com/4xEupwTEic — Education International (@eduint) June 27, 2022

During the Pre-Summit, Education International called for a new deal for teachers and support personnel as a prerequisite to any meaningful transformation in education. As part of the new deal, governments must:

• Increase investment in quality public education systems.
• Guarantee labour rights and decent working conditions.
• Invest in quality teacher training and professional development.
• Trust and respect teachers and their pedagogical expertise.
• Involve teacher unions in policy through social dialogue.

🗨️We need a new deal for teachers! With guaranteed labor rights and decent working conditions. With trust and respect. We say this to UNESCO and to the world. ➡️RT if you agree.⏩ #TransformingEducation #EdChat pic.twitter.com/S5qdYAYjTI — Education International (@eduint) July 4, 2022

Schools are just buildings without teachers

Michelle Codrington Rogers, citizenship teacher from the UK and former president of NASUWT, took the stage at the Pre-Summit and delivered a powerful message from teachers everywhere to decision-makers at the event and beyond:

“Value teachers, pay teachers, trust teachers, and make sure that teachers are involved in the decision making. That's the only way we can transform education.”

Michelle Codrington Rogers | Citizenship teacher, UK

Watch her full intervention below.

📢 A message from classrooms everywhere to the ministers and heads of state gathered at the #TransformingEducation Pre-Summit: 🗨️ #ValueTeachers , pay teachers, trust teachers and ensure we are involved in the decision making. It is the only way to transform education. - @MNasuwt pic.twitter.com/LdUWCd7Qz9 — Education International (@eduint) June 29, 2022

Education International is represented on the Transforming Education Summit Advisory Committee by its General Secretary David Edwards. EI will continue to call for all countries to include education unions in the national consultations organised in the lead up to the Summit in September.

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"Support staff are the infrastructure of the world", by Lorretta Johnson.

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Transformative education: Towards New Learning

If the pace of change in schools seemed glacial over the course of the 20th century, there are reasons to believe that it is about to quicken in the 21st. Some of the rea- sons for this may be attributed to external factors. It is nearly impossible for schools today to avoid addressing new technologies, globalisation, diverse classrooms, the changing nature of work and citizenship, and the shifting dimensions of human subjectivity, identity and personality. Schools increasingly have to speak to these broader social realities simply in order to remain relevant.

See Bill Gates on American Schools.

Among the changes educators face, some come from the changing sensibilities of students and teachers. In the developed world at least, today’s children and young people come from the video game, MP3 and digital television generation. They are the products of child-centred upbringing in a consumer society. They will simply not put up with traditional classrooms the way earlier generations did, even if at times these older generations only barely tolerated them. Nor will today’s teachers put up with working environments that challenge their professionalism by dictating the script of what they will teach, when they will teach it and how they will teach it.

See Transformative Education Case Studies.

Meanwhile, new possibilities for teaching are also opened up by the new, digital media. In its initial phases, e-learning has often appeared to replicate the worst of old teaching. But a newer phase of e-learning is creating new learning spaces in which teachers and learners challenge and transform the social relations of traditional classrooms and didactic pedagogies.

Educators need to be keen observers of change. This is the only way we can keep our teaching, and our schools, up to date and relevant. But, more than this, we must be agenda-setters and change-makers. We have the power to transform our classrooms and our schools. As we embark on these transformations, we also make our own contribution to the transformation of the broader society. Better learners will better contribute to the making of a better society.

If we were to choose a single word to characterise the agenda of the New Learning, it is to be ‘transformative’. New Learning, for us, is thus not simply based on a reading of change; it is also grounded in an optimistic agenda in which we educators can constructively contribute to change.

If knowledge is indeed as pivotal in contemporary society as the ‘new economy’ commentators and politicians claim, then educators should seize the agenda and position themselves as forces of change. Not only is the education of the near future likely to drift further away from its roots in the industrial era. So it should. And ‘should’ means that we have a professional responsibility to be change agents who design the education for the future.

After a century of progressivist attempts to improve on didactic education, the ‘New Learning’ needs to be authentic and more; it should also be ‘transformative’. Being authentic may produce a better it between education and society, but leaves society fundamentally the way it is. It sets out to reflect the realities of the world more than to change them. It does not necessarily move the learner in terms of intergenerational mobility or life trajectory. Transformative education builds on many of the insights of authentic pedagogy, to be sure, but ups the ante. Its aims are no less than to change the life chances of the learner and to change their world.

The transformative education that we identify is emergent. Nowhere are we there yet, but we can see many symptomatic signs of change. Transformative education is an idea that builds upon and extends the insights into the nature of learning and the role of education in society to be found at moments in both didactic and authentic education, while attempting to move beyond their main limitations. It is something that recognises the educational legacies of the past in order to design better educational futures. Transformative education is an act of imagination for the future of learning and an attempt to find practical ways to develop aspects of this future in the educational practices of the present. It is an open-ended struggle rather than a clear destination, a process rather than a formula for action. It is work-in-progress.

The third part of each chapter of this book describes transformative dimensions of our ‘New Learning’ proposal. The idea of transformation stands in contradistinction to, at the same time as it builds upon and develops, the heritage practices of didactic and authentic education. In one sense, this is an exercise in the broad integration of ideas across the science of education, articulating a theoretical framework for the discipline.

This exercise, however, is also a very grounded and practical one. As educators – teachers and people who have worked with teachers in training and in-service professional development – we have ourselves struggled with the practical question of the design of our educational futures in the various projects with which we have been involved, from Social Literacy in the 1980s, to Multiliteracies in the 1990s, to Learning by Design in the 2000s. The ideas of New Learning and transformation are, for us, not just schematic and theoretical. They are vividly and insistently practical, the stuff of what you do with your learners on Monday morning.

See Kalantzis and Cope, A Learning Journey.

So what do we think a transformative education might achieve? At its best, trans- formative education embodies a realistic view of contemporary society, or the kinds of knowledge and capacities for knowing that children need to develop in order to be good workers in a ‘knowledge economy’; participating citizens in a globalised, cosmopolitan society; and balanced personalities in a society that affords a range of life choices that at times feels overwhelming. It nurtures the social sensibilities of a kind of person who understands that they determine the world by their actions as much as they are determined by that world. It creates a person who understands how their individual needs are inextricably linked with their responsibility to work for the common good as we become more and more closely connected into ever-expanding and overlapping social networks.

Make of this what you will. It could be that you see it as a sensible conservatism, sensible for being realistic about the contemporary forces of technology, globalisation and cultural change. Or you could see it to be an emancipatory view that aspires to make a future that is different from the present by addressing its many crises – of poverty, environment, cultural difference and existential meaning, for instance. In other words, the transformation may be pragmatic (enabling learners to do their best in the given social conditions) or it may be emancipatory (making the world a better place) or it may be both.

What follows is an outline of some aspects of the landscape of New Learning and its transformative view of education. Some of this may be happening now. Some looks likely to happen. Other things may happen sooner or later.

Dimension 1: Architectonic

Imagine this scenario: what if students could do their work anywhere, not just in the classroom to which the school timetable has sent them, but in small syndicate rooms, in the library, in somebody else’s classroom, in locations out in the community where knowledge is made and used (a local library, a gallery or museum, a workplace, a community organisation) or in a group of students who decided to work at one of its members’ homes? What if they are connected with teachers, information and other learners globally and locally, seven days a week, 24 hours a day through any number of web-enabled devices?

Impossible, you might say. What about the teacher’s duty of care? How would the teacher know what each student was doing? Where they were? What they were exposed to? To which we might respond, nowadays you can know where every child is, no matter where they are, and as well as any teacher did, perched up on their little platform surveying the traditional class. Every child in this scenario has a mobile phone, a reading and writing tablet, or a personal computer, with global positioning system facility that tells you exactly where they are within a range of error of one metre. (This happens to be about the same margin for positional error as in the traditional classroom.) It means they can talk to you and you can talk to them. And you can know exactly what they are doing because they are constantly committing their work to a ‘cloud’ web server-based content sharing and messaging system that wraps around this work. Every message is collected, and this can tell every little step in the developmental ‘story’ of that work. The teacher can just as easily as ever ‘see’ what the learners are doing, and automated systems can alert them when students stray beyond agreed locations, or outside of negotiated task parameters. This is particularly helpful in the case of jointly constructed student work, because it is now possible to see exactly who has done what in a collaborative piece of work.

This is a new communications design, and one that means that students do not have to be co-located within a classroom. In fact, the physical classroom for thirty kids and one teacher may become an anachronism, a throwback of industrial-era schooling.

See The MET: No classes, no grades and 94% graduation rate.

What on earth are we going to do with all those old school buildings now? Authentic education made the best of heritage infrastructure, unbolting the desks from the floor and rearranging the rooms in ways that had never been envisaged by their architects. Up to a point, we can knock down the internal walls in old schools and put up new ones that divide the space in different and more varied ways. We can set up wireless connectivity in the school so the dominant communications dynamic is not room-by-room, one-voice-at-a-time audio. But there may be a limit to how far we can go with this. And when we reach this limit, we might need to build completely new schools in which spaces are multifunction, multipurpose, flexible and varied.

See Class Work.

If we trace the trends to their logical conclusion, sometimes it may be just too hard to redesign the old schools. In these cases, we might have to regard the old buildings as a real-estate problem rather than an educational one. Perhaps developers with some lair for recycling might turn them into community drop-in centres, apartments or marketplaces and so help fund the building of brand new schools for the future.

Dimension 2: Discursive

Traditional teaching discouraged lateral communication between students. The New Learning thrives on enormous amounts of lateral communication between learners: face-to-face talk; Internet and mobile telephony; online chat; instant messaging; email and messaging around text, image, sound and video in content creation and sharing environments. In the old classroom this amount of lateral interaction would have turned out to be unmanageable ‘noise’. The teacher could not possibly have listened to it all at once. The stuff that would have been noise is now ‘visible’, as the teacher selectively views interactions and intelligent computer ‘agents’ automatically monitor student interactions and send the teacher alerts if anything seems out of order. It also allows for multiple languages, multimodality, invented discourses and special communication means for those with disabilities, thus expanding exponentially access and potentials for expression of meaning.

In this environment, the orienting axis of communications has changed from vertical to lateral. Learners become teachers of each other. They give each other structured feedback. There is a certain kind of levelling of the roles of teacher and learner. They are not, of course, equals in terms of teachers’ greater responsibility for building scaffolds for student learning based on their deep professional understanding of the science of education, nor in terms of their respected positions as bearers of authoritative knowledge, nor in terms of their duty of care to ensure that learning environments are welcoming and safe. However, there is a subtle but important dis- cursive shift from the teacher’s authoritarian stance in the traditional classroom to their authoritative position in the New Learning. The old teaching discourse of command becomes the new learning discourse of dialogue.

Along the way, the neat mathematics of teaching changes. It does not always have to be one teacher to thirty or so students. Sometimes it will be one to one, other times one to a small group, other times one to one hundred (when lots of learners access an online resource created by a teacher, or watch a teacher’s video, or listen to a large group presentation, either live in-person or live online). Still other times it will be two or more to however many – in the case of team teaching or jointly created learning resources. The overall teacher–student ratios might stay the same. (It is hard to imagine that resourcing for education will suddenly improve, although educators should continue, insistently, to make the claim that a knowledge economy is only as dynamic as the investment it is prepared to make in education.) It’s just that the economies of scale may be much more variable. The average of one to thirty does not necessarily have to change. It just no longer means that this has to be the same one to the same thirty, or always in the one place and always at the one time. Alternatively, if the human resources of educators are to be used more efficiently (for instance, learners only accessing teachers when they are needed, otherwise working in crafted, self-paced learning environments, learning with peers and learning in community) there may be scope to increase teachers’ salaries to a significant extent, with or without substantially more resources overall having to be devoted to education.

See Children Learning on their Own.

Dimension 3: Intersubjective

Authentic education went some of the way to change the intersubjective balance of agency between teachers and learners. It granted learners a significant role in constructing their own knowledge through experiential-, inquiry- or activity-based learning. But the teacher was still very much in command and the systems of reward and punishment remained little changed. At best, individual learners could do their own work, at their own pace and in their own way, perhaps with some support and assistance from a group.

The New Learning places an additional premium on learner engagement, starting with the careful identification of learner needs, identities, expectations, aspirations, interests and motivations. If the learner fails to engage with these raw materials of subjectivity or agency, they will not learn. Critically, however, these things are not individual (the ‘activity’ notion in authentic education), but the stuff of social relationships (hence an ‘interactivity’ notion in the New Learning). Successful learning occurs in a social context that affirms the learner’s identity and in a social setting that supports their interests, values, perspectives and contributions. The deepest learning occurs in an environment of reciprocity and sociability. This is a context in which learning is a matter of negotiation rather than imposed subject contents, and where students are meaning makers as much as they are meaning receivers. It is also a context in which new incentive and evaluation systems need to be designed into the learning experience – work that is truly interesting and engaging from the learner’s point of view; collaborations with others that include the social expectation that you should give your all; communication of the work to other learners, parents and the broader community, perhaps through web-based portfolios; and assessment of published portfolios by qualitative review rather than a single mark and by peer review rather than only by the teacher.

Above all, these new intersubjective relations mean that teachers need to let go of the old position of command they have become so used to holding. This is some- times intimidating for those who were schooled in the old teaching or even some forms of authentic education. Teachers here need to see themselves more as collaborative researchers, designing and tracking, purposeful, transformative interventions. This will require supportive networking and professional collaborations: with other teachers, community partners and with learners themselves. Allow the learners to take greater responsibility for their learning. Allow that they might know, or be able to find out, things that you, the teacher, would not necessarily know. Allow that trust will breed responsibility. And allow that things will go wrong, but that the balance of benefit as measured on a scale of the effectiveness of learning, will be worth it.

See Discovery 1, Christchurch.

Dimension 4: Socio-cultural

In the New Learning, learners’ different attributes are fundamental. Effective learning will not occur unless the professional educator finds a way to deal with these differences. They are myriad: material (class, local and family), corporeal (age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental characteristics) and symbolic (culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona). And they are profound, representing at times huge gulfs between one learner and the next – in values, style, affect, sensibility and disposition. We discuss these differences in detail in Chapter 5.

In response to these differences, the New Learning spends time finding out about learners’ prior experiences, interests and aspirations. It allows that different learners can be working on very different things at the same time. It allows for different learning habits: some learners will feel more comfortable learning by immersion in experience, willing to wait for a ‘big picture’ view to emerge; others will want to start with the abstract map of the big picture, then try to it the experiential pieces into that map. New Learning identifies and negotiates alternative learning pathways to common goals, appropriate to students’ capacities as formed by prior learning, meeting their needs and satisfying their interests.

Getting beyond the subtle and often not-so-subtle homogenising and assimilationist tendencies of didactic and authentic education, the New Learning is inclusive (no child left unbelonging) and pluralist, respecting and building upon the personal experiences and cultural knowledge each learner brings to learning. It fosters the sensibilities and develops the skills for affirming one’s own and others’ identities and negotiating differences in order to succeed. It is locally grounded, yet outward looking towards a global context.

Dimension 5: Proprietary

In authentic education, the classroom is still a relatively private, enclosed space. Learners mainly do their own, private work, albeit sometimes with higher levels of individualisation and self-direction than was the case in the didactic teaching. In the New Learning, the physical walls are broken down if not literally then metaphorically.

No longer ‘lone rangers’, teachers work together as members of an integrated community of professional collaborators. They work closely with other teachers in team teaching. They document, publish and share the lesson plans and learning resources they have developed. They work with aides to assist students with identified needs requiring a specialist outside of the teacher’s range of expertise. They involve parents. They involve community experts – on site, online, or hosting learners off site – who can make a contribution to the learning.

The teacher of the old, cloistered classroom becomes a thing of the past. No longer is the classroom an enclosed, private, even secret, space. What the teacher does with ‘their’ class is no longer simply a matter of spoken words that disappear into the ether the moment they are uttered. They create their learning designs in accessible new media spaces, in which learning interactions are more visible and can be incidentally recorded. Now they can become a different kind of worker, a collaborative professional whose knowledge and experiences are always shared and, for this reason, complemented and corroborated by other professionals. Their every pedagogical word is transparently on the record and open to scrutiny – the learning sequences they have created for their learners, the conversations with the students around their work.

Student learning activities become more open and collaborative, too. In authentic education, student learning may be more individualised and self-paced than in didactic teaching. Even when a student is doing a complex, multidisciplinary self-directed project or assignment, it still mostly has to be ‘your own work’. (‘Don’t copy’ and ‘it’s a problem if your parents help’ ... too much or too obviously, that is.)

There’s still a place for individualised activities and private learning spaces in the New Learning. That’s not because individualised learning is an end in itself. In fact, making this an end itself (‘my marks’ for ‘my work’) seems to encourage students to play the system by cheating or plagiarising. The audience for the meaning maker in individualised learning should not just be the audience of one, the assessing teacher who gives the work a ‘54’ (which we get to know means ‘passable but not very good’) or a ‘76’ (‘pretty good but not brilliant’). Rather, the audience for every student when they make meanings should be other learners (the class as a learning community), parents and the wider world. This is what happens when the work is published to the Internet, simultaneously into the learner’s own portfolio and the class ‘bookstore’. This way, private vertical communication lows are replaced by lateral, public, community oriented lows. Learners speak to an audience of many. If you dare to plagiarise, it is not just the teacher you are trying to deceive, but your peers and the world – and it’s more likely your peers who will find you out. Easily accessible digital text makes it easier to plagiarise, and also harder to get away with, because there are more people who might pick it up and because the sources are more public and easily traceable.

Beyond individualised teaching, the New Learning opens up space for collaborative learning, reflecting the changing shape of today’s workplaces and learning communities beyond the formal institutional settings of education. Collaborative work is produced in pairs or small groups; students thus learn how to think and act as team players. The collective outcome is greater than the sum of the individuals’ contributions. So, the learners become good communicators, good readers of others’ differences, good at negotiating, good at compromising and good at producing knowledge that is jointly owned. In didactic teaching as well as in authentic education, collaborative work was hard to manage for the most practical of reasons. How could an assessor ever know whose contribution was whose, without watching every learner’s every move? With the versioning, messaging and tracking systems of today’s networked content management environments, however, it’s possible to know exactly who did what and when. If you’re not pulling your weight, it will be obvious to the other learners and the teacher.

The nice twist is that, as soon as learners become good at collaborative learning, they start to do individualised learning in a new way. If you’re new to something, you find expert sources (peers, specialists, published information) who will give you explicit support and advice (we call this ‘assisted competence’ – see Chapter 9). If you’re comfortable with something and think you can figure it out more or less for yourself, you’ll be confident enough to use, assemble and acknowledge a variety of other sources of information and inspiration (‘autonomous competence’ – also Chapter 9). Soon, even individualised activity becomes collaborative. This is how the active learning processes of authentic education turn into the interactive learning processes of transformative education.

See Ivan Illich on ‘Deschooling’.

Dimension 6: Epistemological

In didactic teaching, teachers and textbooks told. They expounded, bit by laborious bit, the facts and theories they thought learners needed to know in order to master a discipline. Transformative education encourages ways of thinking based on a different understanding of how knowledge is most effectively and powerfully made, particularly in today’s social settings and those of the conceivable future. The base point is not teacherly or textbookish regurgitations of knowledge, but working with real- world texts, issues, ideas and problems. Students research the facts, test them and corroborate them. Indeed, facts only become facts when they have passed a number of tests – of apperception (how well have you observed?), plausibility (do the facts make sense?) and applicability (do they it with other facts and do they work?). These tests are for the student to apply, never to take a single source at its word and never to accept that a fact is a fact just because someone says so. Then, putting the facts together, hypotheses are developed, and theories are created inductively and then tested deductively against the facts. Thus, as we argue in greater detail in Chapter 8, learners become reflexive knowledge makers rather than knowledge receptors. This way, the disciplines become not so much bunches of facts and theories, but approaches to knowledge creation: scientific, historical or literary, for instance. And knowledge is constructed from multiple sources, based on variable perspectives, knowledge orientations and approaches to problems.

See Ken Robinson on How Schools Kill Creativity.

Underlying this is a profound shift in the direction of knowledge lows. Learners become co-designers of knowledge, developing habits of mind in which they are comfortable members of knowledge-producing and knowledge-sharing communities. And teachers build learning experiences that engage with learner subjectivities, developing and negotiating learning scaffolds that can be customised for different individual learners or groups of learners and extend learners. In so doing, they build on and extend learners’ identities and senses of destiny.

Along the way, discipline boundaries may need to be blurred, to the extent even of breaking out of the constraints of the old, subject-divided timetable. The New Learning becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, requiring deeper engagement with knowledge in all its complexity and ambiguity.

If we are to avoid the difficulties of the ‘crowded curriculum’ or the ‘shopping mall curriculum’, we may have to re-conceive the core of learning or ‘the basics’. We may even need to move towards more general and more comprehensive education, with just a few key areas, such as technology (science, mathematics, applied sciences), commerce (enterprise, innovation, working together) and humanities (cultural understandings, capacities for intercultural interaction and boundary crossing). Even though this is a moment of technical specialisation, change and diversity in all areas of knowledge and human experience, it may well be that formal education needs to become more centred and more focused on a few core areas of learning. Perhaps, each of these core areas should be studied at a higher level of generality than the traditional subject areas, should be relevant to a broad range of students with quite different life aspirations, and should be applicable in very different contexts. This may prove to be the essence of a ‘new basics’.

Finally, the source of valid knowledge is no longer primarily linguistic as it was in the heritage practices of didactic teaching and, even more narrowly, the written word. It is also multimodal, where the visual (diagram, picture, moving image), gestural, tactile and spatial are considered to be just as valid knowledge sources as writing. This reflects the deeply integrated, synaesthetic meanings of our contemporary communications environment (Kalantzis and Cope 2012). Learners, moreover, can build and represent knowledge using a variety of meaning modes and mixes of mode. Why should a diagram be of less knowledge value than a theory-in-words? Or a documentary video of less value than an essay?

Dimension 7: Pedagogical

Didactic education focused on fixed content knowledge: undeniable facts and theories to be applied. This knowledge was supposed to last for life. Applied today, this kind of education becomes instantly redundant. Knowledge today is constantly changing, and particularly so in areas of dramatic social transformation, such as computing, biotechnologies, identities/sexualities or socio-historical interpretation. Indeed, old disciplinary approaches often foster rigid ways of thinking that are counter-productive for the workers, citizens and persons of today and the near future.

The New Learning is less about delivering a body of knowledge and skills that will be good for life and more about forming a deeply knowing kind of person. This person will be aware of what they don’t know, capable of working out what they need to know and be able to create their own knowledge, either autonomously or in collaboration with others.

In the New Learning, learners not only become creators of knowledge. They also represent the fruits of their creativity to each other. Their learning becomes a source for other learners. Knowledge sharing and collaborative learning are the glue that binds together collective intelligence.

As much as they develop disciplinary or content knowledge, they also develop knowledge about their knowledge making, and learning about how they learn. These habits of mind are often called ‘metacognition’: thinking about thinking alongside the pragmatics of thinking. This makes thinking all the more powerful. Metacognition entails one’s own thinking processes, consciously developing knowledge strategies and continuous self-monitoring to reflect on one’s learning. In these ways, not only do learners become co-designers of knowledge, they also become co-designers of learning.

At the same time, the role of the teacher-as-pedagogue also changes. No longer do they stand and deliver. No more are they primarily a font of disciplinary knowledge. Their role expands as they are now not only knowledge experts but also designers of knowledge-making environments, builders of learning scaffolds, managers of student learning and researchers of learner performance.

Dimension 8: Moral

Education always creates ‘kinds of persons’. Didactic education forms people who have learned rules and can be relied on to obey them; people who take answers out to the world rather than regard the world as an ever-unfolding series of problems to be solved; and people who think they have ‘correct’ knowledge in the private spaces of their heads. As we argue in the chapters that follow, these orientations to the world are inadequate to the demands of changing work (Chapter 3), citizenship (Chapter 4) and personhood (Chapter 5). The New Learning imagines a kind of person who is able to navigate constant change and deep diversity, learn as they go, solve problems, collaborate, innovate and be flexible and creative. This kind of person will not be traumatised by change. They will not suffer from ‘future shock’ or retreat into the narrow safety of the community of their origins. Rather, they will be able to take control as an agent of social design in the spaces in which they live and work. The guiding metaphor for their social life is the networked ‘we’: humanly interconnected, discerning, agile and flexible.

See Paulo Freire on Education that Liberates.

The results of this New Learning will not be student scores spread neatly across a bell curve, a few learners at the bottom of the class, most clustered around the middle and a few at the top. There is no room for failure and marginalisation in the school of the New Learning. Poor results are anathema for individuals and society. Nor is there room for a bulge of mediocrity.

Children will grow up to do different things in their lives, and as adults may make comparable, though varied contributions to their worlds. That should be the basic assumption of education, and reward and credentialling systems need to make this abundantly clear. When learners leave school they should not be branded with a spread of exit scores statistically derived from narrow or anachronistic norms of success and failure.

See Classrooms of the Heart.

At the failure end of the spectrum, the stakes are higher than ever – even affluent societies cannot afford a dysfunctional underclass. At the success end of the spectrum, maybe the ‘smart’ ones are just smart at playing the game of school. Are we simply rewarding those who play the system rather than those who are creative and innovative? Is this the kind of person we really want as the worker and citizen of the future? Instead of these bald numerical scores, perhaps students should leave the various stages in their learning with complex and rounded stories of what they have actually done in their lives and their learning, stories that can be read in their fullness by other educational institutions, employers and the community.

In this chapter, we have told a story of tradition and change, from the didactic education to authentic education, to our proposal for the transformative world of New Learning that is only now emerging and the shape of which is not yet clear.

We have painted this picture of change in the broadest of brushstrokes. History, however, is rarely a succession of neatly defined periods. Today, you will find educational settings anywhere in the world that predominantly reflect one of these three approaches or paradigms for learning. And within one of these sites you may find moments and incidents that reflect one approach in one moment, and another approach in another moment. You will find patterns of variation from country to country, school system to school system, school to school, classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher, discipline area to discipline area and even from one moment to the next within the life of a single classroom. Sometimes one approach – didactic, authentic or transformative – will seem appropriate for the time and the setting. Other times it will not.

In this book, we try to imagine what a new phase in the development of modern education will be like. We will be to looking for signs of things to come in the innovative educational practices of today. This, we believe, is not simply an act of imagination, a willful utopianism. Given the changes occurring today – globalisation, community diversity, new technologies, changing work, and the formation of new kinds of persons with different sensibilities, to name just a few gusts among the winds of change – the New Learning of which we are speaking may soon become a necessity.

Unless, that is, we allow schools to slip into a crisis of irrelevance. We’ll know when such a crisis arrives, because it will translate into employers’ complaints about graduates, into student discipline problems, and into a general community anxiety that schools are not teaching learners what they need for the contemporary world. On these indicators, in many places, this crisis has already arrived.

We Have the Power to Transform Education

Voices from the field   10 august 2017 by grant lichtman, what surprised and excited me most is that many schools are able to transform without permission, empowerment, or additional resources from the forces that are largely responsible for the inertia in the first place., grant lichtman.

Education Reimagined has had the pleasure of collaborating with Grant Lichtman since 2015. His work, most prominently displayed in his book, #EdJourney, has helped bring national attention to the learner-centered movement and the viable work already underway in communities across the country. Set to release his third book, Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education, Grant wants to empower educators to act now in transforming their environments.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF OUR SCHOOLS  from the outdated model that focuses on rote learning of content and short-term preparation for tests, to one of deeper learning that prepares students for success in a rapidly evolving future is, finally, inevitable.

A decade ago, the number of professional educators and other community stakeholders who either championed or recognized the inevitability of this evolution was relatively small. By no means has this evolution been universally accepted today, but major changes in schools across demographic, geographic, and socio-economic groups have exploded in just the last few years. In my visits and work with thousands of school community stakeholders at more than 150 schools over the last six years, I have seen a remarkable shift away from the prevailing attitude of the early 2000’s.

At a 30,000-foot level, our broad community of education stakeholders—learners, parents, practitioners, administrators, and community builders—is faced with three big questions: “Why” should schools change? “What” does that change look like? And, “how” do we make those changes?

Thankfully, we are working our way through these questions. Some schools and districts are engaged in questioning and making significant changes to their core curriculum, pedagogy, and the roles of both teachers and students. Other schools are at an earlier stage of evolution, wrestling with the question of why schools should, in fact, change. And, they are grappling with the disruption, discomfort, and even fear of the unknown that will become present to the community along the way. This type of staggered or uneven evolution is typical across many industries; one powerful tool the K-12 education has is our willingness to share with each other, which gives schools and districts that are still wondering how to proceed the opportunity to partner with others further along the trajectory of change.

Why Should Schools Change?

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, a number of authors and forward thinkers gained traction with the idea that the rate of change in the world had entered a new stage of rapid acceleration. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it was widely apparent that this rate of change had dramatically eclipsed that of any other time in human history. The other major historical revolutions had evolved over millennia (the agricultural revolution), centuries (communication and transportation), or decades (the industrial revolution). By 2010, changes in technology, communication, global markets, and geopolitics were forcing us to adapt over periods as short as months or just a few years. Yet, over this time of radically increased dynamism in the world around us, our basic system of education has stayed remarkably static.  

In just the last five years, we have seen a growing consensus amongst professional educators, students, parents, and community stakeholders—like employers and colleges—that we simply must update how our schools operate and how our students learn. I think there are four primary points of growing agreement on why education must change:

• First, because we must . Education is meant to prepare young people for their lives, both in the moment and in their futures. The world our young people will engage with over their lifetimes is already very different from that of former generations and will become even more different as the rate of change accelerates. While there will always be a timeless set of knowledge that helps in this preparation, students need skills that help them navigate a future that is increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous).
• Second, because we want to . I, and many others, have asked thousands of educators, parents, students, and community stakeholders what they want education to look like today and in the future, and there is tremendous agreement. We want a system that is more equally balanced between performance in academic subjects and the development of non-cognitive skills that prepare students to lead happy, healthy, and successful lives.
• Third, because we know better . Cognitive neuroscientists, armed with brain-mapping technology, have shown us how learning takes place at its most foundational levels. Not only can we see how engagement takes place within the brain, but we can also connect that engagement to better levels of cognitive development through the processes of deeper learning.
• Fourth, because we can . Technology is never the driver of transformation, but it is always a critical enabler . Like the rise of technologies that fueled the agrarian, industrial, and information revolutions, virtual, connective technologies are already forming the basis of a global socio-neural network with the capacity for deep, authentic, relationship-based learning that is not limited by classroom walls, campus boundaries, and subject-based classes.

What Does the Change Look Like?

There is a high degree of convergence about what education looks like in a post-traditional ecosystem. This does not mean all schools are starting to look and act the same; on the contrary, we see a dramatic differentiation of school and non-traditional learning experiences from community to community. But, as I travel the country and interact with school community stakeholders from a wide range of public, private, and charter schools, serving equally wide ranges of student populations, I find dramatically more agreement than disagreement about “what” great education looks like in our world today.

The most common theme is the major shift from “doing learning to learners” to “learning by and with the learner.” Over the last several years, it seems we are increasingly coalescing around the term “deeper learning” to describe this change. I passively mentioned this phrase at the outset, but let’s come full circle on it. In 2013, the Hewlett Foundation defined deeper learning as “an umbrella term for the skills and knowledge that students must possess to succeed in 21st century jobs and civic life. At its heart, it is a set of competencies students must master in order to develop a keen understanding of academic content and apply their knowledge to problems in the classroom and on the job.” Hewlett lists these competencies as follows:

• Mastering core academic content
• Thinking critically and solving complex problems
• Working collaboratively
• Communicating effectively
• Learning how to learn
• Developing academic mindsets

Educators, schools and districts, and their community partners add meat to these bones in many different ways, and those who subscribe to the overall thesis generally agree there is no single path to get there (a more detailed articulation of how these six overarching elements are most frequently manifested in the classroom can be found in the free download Introduction of my new book, Moving the Rock , and on a “Deeper Learning Cheat Sheet,” which you can find on the Resources page of my website). With multiple paths to choose from, how can a community approach these changes in ways that are most beneficial to their learners?

How Schools are Making the Change

In my last book, #EdJourney , I reported on my visits with more than 60 individual schools around the country, on how some schools are overcoming the inevitable obstacles to change and successfully transforming when others are not. For my new book, Moving the Rock , I asked a more global question: How can we transform the system of education at scale, and, more specifically, get beyond the finger pointing and pendulum swings that have created the massive inertia that has plagued our school systems for decades?

It turns out “the answer” shows up in a number of ways depending on the community exploring the question. What surprised and excited me most is that many schools are able to transform without permission, empowerment, or additional resources from the forces that are largely responsible for the inertia in the first place. Instead, these successful schools and districts identified the freedom and resources already available to them and used them in brand new ways. In the words of Kaleb Rashad, principal of High Tech High in San Diego, “The revolution will not be authorized!”

The seven primary chapters of Moving the Rock address each of these big “levers” that are successfully changing the school system in typical schools and districts across the country. While I did not do research overseas for the book, I imagine many of these same levers will apply in a range of other national school systems, and they are all within reach of school community stakeholders who want to transform our schools.

Borrowing from the introduction to the book, these seven “levers” are:

• Creating Demand: Unlike a decade ago, education is now subject to the market forces of supply and demand. All over the country, parents and families are voting with their feet and money. They are demanding a different approach to learning and seeking out non-traditional learning opportunities that meet those demands.
• School-Community Learning Laboratories: Traditional schools are disconnected from their own communities and the powerful learning resources those communities can provide. We need to massively reconnect “school” and “world” in ways that deepen learning, better prepare students for life after school in the real world, and get broader community skin in the game.
• Free, Universal Access to Knowledge and Curriculum : The rapid growth in the quality and availability of free, fully vetted curriculum, learning materials, and remarkable web-based knowledge sources is leading to the demise of expensive textbooks and other canned, outdated content delivery mechanisms.
• Measuring Success and Re-tooling College Admissions : Schools are afraid to adopt changes that might jeopardize their students’ chances at college admissions. This fear amongst parents and students is one of the most powerful obstructions to school change. We are starting to see major cracks in this dam as both colleges ( “Turning the Tide” ) and high schools ( Mastery Transcript Consortium) have begun to re-think what they value most and how to measure those values in individual students.
• Teacher Training for Deeper Learning: Most post-secondary education schools are still preparing young teachers for an Industrial age learning model that is on the wane, not the rise. We need a rapid, widespread, collaborative national overhaul of the teacher education program, led by courageous future-focused educators from research universities, teaching colleges, and the practitioners in K-12 schools.
• Connectivity : Learning beyond the classroom has held promise for a decade. But, online courses have a core weakness: they have not been able to replicate or replace the critical strengths and relationships of a face-to-face classroom. Booming investment and dramatic advances in virtual reality will revolutionize how people all over the world connect, communicate, create, share, and learn together.
• Distributed Leadership and Training : Few educators have ever received training in the skills of management and organizational leadership that promote dynamic innovation in many of our leading companies but is nearly absent in schools. Teachers and administrators need universal access to modern leadership skills that embrace, rather than stymie, change and innovation.

We also see a convergence of tactical processes in individual schools and districts that accelerate transformation. Schools that intentionally embark on this process, and stay the course past inevitable hurdles like leadership changes and interest-group intransigence, can make significant changes to the traditional school operating system in a matter of just a few years. The following is my sequence of common tactics, influenced by and overlapping with those outlined by Kotter (2012) in the Harvard Business Review :

• Create a sense of urgency around a big opportunity
• Involve the community through radical inclusiveness and transparency
• Unwrap and articulate a shared North Star
• Grow a volunteer army of eager change agents
• Accelerate movement by removing barriers
• Design and test with rigid devotion to logic model progressions
• Visibly celebrate significant early wins
• Institutionalize changes in culture

It is not enough to talk about why education must change. And, if we stop worrying too much about the details of “what,” there is enough agreement to move forward with courage and speed. People across our communities who care about good education have proven strategies that don’t require large additional resources or permission to transform many, if not most, of our schools. There is no one left to point fingers at, to blame for a system that has failed to evolve substantively in more than 100 years. It is up to us; we just have to do it. If we fail, it is on us.

Author and Education Consultant

Grant Lichtman is an internationally-recognized thought leader on the transformation of K-12 education. He works with school teams to develop a comfort and capacity for change in a rapidly changing world. Since 2012, Grant has visited more than 125 schools and districts, published three books, written numerous articles, and worked with thousands of school and community stakeholders to develop unique and powerful visions and strategies for transforming education.

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Post    may 11, 2017, how this alternative learning environment is weaving social-emotional skills into their learner-centered practice, post    november 20, 2015, education is a problem that can't be reformed.

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We recently announced a new R&D acceleration initiative to connect and support local communities ready to bring public, equitable, learner-centered ecosystems to life.

Five questions on transformative education

Ahead of the 5th UNESCO Forum on Transformative Education for Sustainable Development, Global Citizenship and health and well-being , find out more transformative education, why we need it, and how you can be involved in transforming society through learning.

For 75 years, UNESCO has been working to build a more just, inclusive, sustainable, healthy world through education.

But it’s clear – what we have learn has not prepared us for the challenges we face today.

That’s why we need education that is transformative, that transforms people who can transform societies and build a better future.

Why do we need to transform education?

Our world is facing unprecedented challenges - climate change, violent and hateful ideologies, mass loss of biodiversity, new conflicts and the risks of global pandemics to name only a few.

Education systems need to be reoriented to equip learners with the knowledge, values, and abilities to act for the betterment of all people and the planet, as responsible citizens of a global community.

What is “transformative education”?  

Transformative education involves teaching and learning geared to motivate and empower happy and healthy learners to take informed decisions and actions at the individual, community and global levels.​

Learners must engage with the world and find coherence between the world they experience in school and the world we all wish to build outside school.

To build this world, we need to learn to read and write, but we also need to learn collaboration, empathy, complex problem solving, connection to other human beings and nature.

Education can only be “transformative” when students feel valued, acknowledged, safe and are included in the learning community as full and active members. This starts by preventing and addressing school violence and bullying, gender-based violence, as well as health and gender related discrimination towards learners and educators.

Teachers are expected to transform their teaching, for example, ensuring that the curriculum, pedagogy, learning materials, schools or learning environments are meaningful in the natural, political, economic, and cultural contexts.

For education to be of high quality, it must be transformative.

This is why Sustainable Development Goal target 4.7, which aims to help us transform the world, is integral to Sustainable Development Goal 4 and all other Sustainable Development Goals.

Read some examples of how education can be transformative in Angel and Fatma’s stories from Tanzania, Maritza’s from Guatemala’s story or through the 2021 ESD Prize Winners or the education initiatives on the UNESCO Green Citizen platform.

What does UNESCO do on transformative education?

UNESCO have called for a new social contract on education as part of a landmark report on the Futures of Education .

The new social contract for education must unite us around collective endeavours and provide the knowledge and innovation needed to shape sustainable and peaceful futures for all anchored in social, economic, and environmental justice. It must, as this report does, champion the role played by teachers.

UNESCO’s programmes on education for sustainable development (ESD), global citizenship education  (GCED) and  education for health and well-being are all central to achieving this vision, and ensuring education is transformative for every student in every country.

Together, they aim to achieve the transformation of education systems so that learners of all ages are supported to care for one another and the planet, to create more peaceful, just and sustainable societies.

What is the 5th UNESCO Forum on Transformative Education?

The 5th UNESCO Forum on Transformative Education for Sustainable Development, Global Citizenship, Health and Well-being is a virtual event that will be held from 29 November to 1 December 2021 in Seoul, Republic of Korea.

UNESCO and  APCEIU  will bring  together experts in  education for sustainable development ,  global citizenship education  and  education for health and well-being  to discuss good practices, progress, monitoring and mainstreaming transformative education towards  Sustainable Development Goal target 4.7.

How can I get involved?

The opening, closing and plenary sessions of the Forum will be livestreamed via UNESCO’s YouTube. Check the Forum webpage on the 29 November for the links, or sign up to be sent the information closer to the day.

You can join the global conversation about the Forum, share your thoughts on the transformation of education and great examples with #TransformativeEducation during the Forum and beyond. 

• 5th UNESCO Forum on Transformative Education for Sustainable Development, Global Citizenship and health and well-being
• Education for sustainable development  
• Global citizenship education  
• Education for health and well-being

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The Dreamwork of Transformation in Teacher Education

2020, Journal of curriculum theorizing

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This paper is organized from the inside out. I begin with my own pedagogical commitments, briefly sketching elements of culturally relevant pedagogy, anti-oppressive education, and critical pedagogy as they have impacted my work in teacher education. I next work to demonstrate the connections between these commitments and the teacher education program we have just begun at our institution. I articulate the ways in which the explicit social justice and urban foci of our program emerge from engagement with critical literatures in teaching and teacher education. Finally, I argue that understanding teacher education as a liberal art offers us new insights and ways of envisaging further critical approaches to urban teacher education. It is my hope that these reflections and analyses will support others in their/our work to (re)theorize pedagogies of teacher education in order to work toward creating programs that work on the side of justice and equity for teachers, students, and communities.

Deborah Britzman

There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making. However, teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory of knowledge that can analyze social fractures, profound social violence, decisions of disregard, and how from such devastations, psychological significance can be made. Returning to an earlier history and drawing upon philosophers who were also concerned with the relation between teacher education and social reparation, this article advocates for a view of teacher education that can tolerate existential and ontological difficulties, psychical complexities, and learning from history. If it is a truism that to teach, teachers must engage knowledge, it is also right to observe that as the new century unfolds, there is still little agreement in our field of teacher education as to which knowledge matters or even what might be the matter with knowledge. Nor is there much understanding regarding how those trying to teach actually learn from their practices, their students, or their incidental anxieties made from acquiring experience. We cannot agree on the length of the practicum, on whether the 19th-century apprentice model is still relevant, or even the future of schooling itself. Various learning taxonomies developed throughout this century try to settle these doubts; yet, however elaborated or simplified, the measures offered never seem adequate for the uncertainties of teaching and learning. It is difficult, then, to even find the subject of teacher education, so inundated is our field with the romance of cognitive styles, the rumblings of brain research, the idealization of information and standards, and the parade of new diagnoses of learning failures: attention deficit disorders, overstimulation, understimulation, and not enough Mozart. At the beginning of this new century, in the confusion of our times, we seem to have a better idea of all that we lack than we have a notion as to what makes understanding so difficult (Britzman, 1998), or even how we might think about the psychological significance of teacher education. We do know more about what holds education and teacher education back. There is the force of governmental interdictions, censoring both ideas and the personal lives of teachers and students. Our own definitions of professionalism preclude complications of selves and then ask for compliance and conformity. We have made great strides in emptying the curriculum from debating itself. Symptoms of these mala-dies can be observed: camera surveillance devises, weapon detectors, and corporate ID tags for students and teachers. Behind these symptoms is the stultifying dream of uniting the nation through a common curriculum made safe from any controversy. And then we are caught in a repetitive debate over whether schools and teacher education can or should be able to prevent eruptions of social violence. The old question of what schooling is for becomes utterly entangled with what it means to think

Teachers College Record

Alfredo J. Artiles

Patrick McQuillan

Ashley Casey

Mary Lou Morton

Teaching and Teacher Education

Patricia Bullock

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What Motivates Teachers to Enter the Profession?

In a piece for EdSurge, researchers share their work that suggests the reason someone chooses to become a teacher could determine how successful they will be in the role.

Andrew Kwok and Brendan Bartanen

August 12, 2024

This commentary was originally published by EdSurge. (Photo iStock)

What if why you choose to become a teacher determines how successful you will be in the role?

Society has always been fascinated to learn about the motivations of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians and how they came to their profession. We think about their career trajectory and consider its relevance to ourselves or people we know. What if, similarly, we learned about the motivations of aspiring K-12 teachers, and used that to predict how effective they will be and how long they will stay in the classroom?

Persistent concerns reiterate teacher shortages throughout the nation . Recent evidence has also pointed to declining interest in becoming a teacher, aligned with the decreased professionalization, prestige and pay of the sector . Yet noble individuals press forward and choose to educate our children anyway. Why, in spite of the headwinds, do they become teachers?

As professors and researchers in university teaching and learning programs, we’re fascinated by this question. We figured that learning more about teacher motivation could help us better understand teacher pipelines and find ways to diversify and improve the quality of our nation’s teachers, so we designed a study to gather more information.

From 2012-2018, nearly 2,800 preservice teachers within one of the largest teacher preparation programs in Texas responded to an essay prompt, “Explain why you decided to become a teacher.” We used a natural language processing algorithm to review their responses.

Historically , people went into teaching for relatively straightforward reasons: They desired a stable career, enjoyed having summers off, or had family members who were teachers. However, across the essay responses, we found that those motivations were not the most prevalent, nor were they related to teacher outcomes — but others were.

Read the full story, including the study results, at EdSurge.

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9 Tips to Help You Survive Your First Year of Teaching (Downloadable)

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The first year in the classroom can be overwhelming and exhausting.

“Everything from my classroom culture to my instruction spiraled out of control my first few months, and the reality of having my own classroom in an underresourced community hit me hard,” writes teacher Gary Kowalski.

To help first-year teachers manage an overwhelming transition into the classroom, Kowalski, who has taught 8th grade English/language arts and social studies for the past 10 years, penned an opinion essay with guidance on how to create a calm and inviting classroom environment right from the start.

Below is a helpful guide you can take with you (or even post on your desk as a reminder to yourself) and share with others.

Download and share.

Vanessa Solis, Associate Design Director and Dominique Bander, Opinion Editorial Assistant contributed to this opinion article.

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