Societal and educational challenges and the changing role of

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Societal and educational challenges and the
changing role of teachers

• Emilija Sakadolskiene
• sakadolskis_at_hotmail.com
• Lithuanian Educational Council
• Vilnius Pedagogical University

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What is a paradigm?
The set of common beliefs and agreements shared
between scientists about how problems should be
understood and addressed The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn, 1962
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Similar concepts

• worldview
• zeitgeist
• metanarrative
• schema (Immanuel Kant).
• disciplinary matrix (Kuhn)

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How paradigm shifts occur

• Phase I New discoveries produce anomalies that
  the current paradigm is unable to explain or fix
• Phase II a sufficiently large quantity of
  anomalies accumulates and the system experiences
  crisis
• Phase III if a sufficient number of people
  oppose the anomalies, a new paradigm is created
  to battle the remnants of the old paradigm.

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A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education
Change magazine 1995 (November/December) Robert
Barr and John Tagg
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The paradigm dichotomy

• The Instructional / Teaching Paradigm
• The Learning Paradigm

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A related concern

• Do alternative teacher certification programs
  match our accepted paradigm of teaching and
  learning?

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Educational paradigm shifts

• The agricultural paradigm
• The industrial paradigm
• The information society
• Knowledge-based society
• The creativity paradigm

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Knowledge is the social product of human
intelligence and creativity.
(New Zealand)
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Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Class
(2002)

• scientists, engineers
• university professors
• writers, artists, entertainers, actors
• designers, architects
• editors, composers, cultural figures
• think tank analysts
• opinion makers

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Elliot W. Eisner The Educational Imagination
(3rd edition, 2002)

• The Explicit Curriculum
• The Implicit Curriculum
• The Null Curriculum

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Daniel H. Pink A Whole New Mind Why Right
Brainers Will Rule the Future

• Design
• Narrative
• Symphony
• Empathy
• Play
• Meaning

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Trends Shaping Education THE ORGANISATION
FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT (OECD)
Centre for Educational Research and
Innovation, 2008
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• Averaged across the 1990-2004 period, more now
  enter than leave all OECD countries except
  Poland. OECD countries are now primarily
  destinations for migrants from other countries.
  The speed with which change can happen is
  illustrated by the cases of Spain and Greece.

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• Increasing competition on global markets has
  underpinned the idea that countries need constant
  innovation to maintain position. Does education
  nurture the creativity necessary to be
  innovative? Education and training systems have
  traditionally been strong bastions of national
  decision-making. Are they sufficiently sensitive
  to the culturally diverse requirements of
  immigrants? Are teachers aware?

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• What role do schools play, through implicit
  messages and explicit guidance, in shaping the
  career and professional (as well as educational)
  choices of girls and boys? How are schools
  experiencing the impact of ever-greater numbers
  of mothers with full careers? Has it changed the
  balance of responsibilities between schools and
  families in raising children for better or
  worse? and has it altered relations between
  fathers and schools?

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• How has greater feminisation of the teaching
  force being experienced by schools and teachers?
• Should policy seek to modify the trend and if so
  in what way?

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• It is common now to maintain that social capital
  is declining as we live more individualistic,
  unconnected lives with falling levels of trust.
  Family structures continue to change marriage is
  less prevalent couples are increasingly living
  together without being married separations and
  divorces are common and one-parent families are
  increasing.

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• We seem to live in a more individualistic world,
  with a declining sense of belonging to the
  traditional reference points of community, church
  or workplace. Is there more or less trust and
  co-operation than before? If people are more
  individualistic, this will promote consumer
  behaviour in education at the expense of social
  goals if social ties are decreasing, this places
  still more pressure on schools to provide a
  source of connection.

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Mary M. Kennedy Inside Teaching How Classroom
Life Undermines Reform, 2005

• Hypotheses why reforms fail
• Lack of knowledge base (subject and pedagogy)
• Beliefs and values differ
• Teacher dispositions
• Circumstances of teaching
• Reform ideals unattainable

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In the opinion of fools it is a humble task, but
in fact it is the noblest of occupations

• - Erasmus