New learning: a charter for change in education¹

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 USA 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 chapter 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 to join the online discussion.

Abstract

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. 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.

Keywords:

• educational leadership and management
• educational policy
• globalisation and internationalization
• inequality and social exclusion in education
• multiculturalism and multicultural education
• technology in education

Notes

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 USA 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 chapter 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 to join the online discussion.

2. For concrete suggestions in the form of action items and supporting evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/new-basics.html

3. For supporting evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/learning-feedback-systems.html

4. See, for instance, http://assess-as-you-go.com

5. For supporting evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/diverse-learners.html

6. This action area was written by Fazal Rizvi, visit, http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/global-citizenship.html for supporting evidence.

7. This action area was written by Michael Peters. For supporting evidence, visit: http://education.illinois.edu/newlearning/sustainability.html

8. This material draws upon the Introduction to González-Gaudiano and Peters (2008).