learning {re} imagined book launch speech

8/11/2019 Learning {Re} imagined book launch speech

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book-launch-transcript - 02/10/2014 - 09:22

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Graham Brown-Martin speech for the launch of Learning {Re}imagined(http://bit.ly/LearningREimagined) Wednesday Oct 1st, 2014 at the RSA,London.

Good evening all and thank you so much for coming out and showing yoursupport for this project.

Apologies for holding my notes but I didnt want to do a Miliband.

10 years ago to the day, I returned to the UK and decided to combine myexperience in the education, creative and digital sectors to start a newconversation about the future of learning. I formed an organisation calledLearning Without Frontiers that during the course of its life brought together aseemingly disparate group of academics, scientists, technologists, artists, gamedesigners, lm makers and provocateurs in some of the most challengingdialogues about our future, why and how we learn. I left LWF in 2012 andembarked on this journey which gave me the opportunity to reect on these tenyears and compile them into the transmedia book that we are celebrating today.

I want to thank Dr Abdulla Al-Thani, Her Highness Sheikha Moza and the all of the team at WISE for their condence and vision in supporting this project andallowing me to challenge every aspect of its creation as well as giving me thecreative and editorial freedoms to make unreasonable demands.

In essence, this working relationship was a microcosm of the challenges thatour global education systems now face in regard to transformation and changewhere the things that we did yesterday are under increased scrutiny andoccasionally clash against new ideas that threaten the status quo. It is, however,through initiatives such as this and indeed the whole WISE programme that weunderstand each other better.

The essence of WISE, I believe, is its global inclusivity. Unfettered by thedemands of corporate sponsorships and their implication that theres a saleinvolved, the organisation is characterised by the broad community of interestfrom almost every part of the world who participate and often attend their

annual summit in Doha. My early and indeed current experiences of attending


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book-launch-transcript - 02/10/2014 - 09:22

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many of them previously unheard, of people working at the vanguard of change,seeking the illusive transformation of the way we educate our people.

Ive often been asked during this journey whether I actually witnessedsomething that I regarded as truly transformational and my answer is that everyperson interviewed and every case study I visited held some of the clues totransformation and that many were transformational within their own contextbut we must recognise that such transformations are di ff erent from how, say,Amazon has transformed retail or Netix has transformed television orFacebook the way we communicate. Education, like religion, is a powerfulstructure designed to reinforce the status quo and until our foundation shifts itis unlikely that we will see a radical global transformation of education

occurring with or without digital technology and as a result the multitude of digital deployments that we are seeing today are merely means of achievinggreater e ffi ciencies and measured outcomes that reinforce centuries of teachingpractices and assessment methods.

Until the business model of assessment is disrupted, like the way other sectorshave transformed, we will nd that the tail continues to wag the dog of learning.

So what do I think will bring about this shift in the foundation that willtransform education systems on a global scale?

The most impressive examples of schools and approaches to learning, and I sawthis in the nearly every case study on all continents, was the adoption of principles dating back to the 19th century and John Dewey. Dewey suggestedrather than the curriculum dictate the direction and the outcome of educationthat it would be the self-realisation of the child themselves that would be thegoal.

The most exciting schools and places of learning that I visited where those thatused Dewey principles in the form of project based learning, where disciplineswerent silod into 1 hour chunks of fact memorisation for later recall. It waslearning by doing with the measurement being what was created at the end. Theproblem is that todays assessment methods, despite advances in so many areasof our lives through digital, are unable to cope and so a childs future isdetermined in an examination room in solitude with pen and paper. This isbaffl ing and we will one day look back on this, I hope, with ridicule.


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learning {re} imagined book launch speech

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