Learning with kids

Yesterday I watched this really interesting lecture from the sociologist Sonia Livingstone. It was about an on going research with children of 9 years old. In collaboration with Julian Sefton-Green, for some months, Livingstone has been “following” a class of 28 students at school and at home. The idea is to understand the potentialities and problems that social media might generate to the kid's education. Some of the research questions are: How do young people use digital technologies within their daily activities and beyond the classroom, as part of their 'learning lives', and under what conditions is this constructive, enabling or impeding? How is youthful engagement with digital technologies shaped by the formal or informal practices, opportunities or risks, empowerment or constraints of the institutions and spaces in which learning occurs? 

For more information: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/The%20Class.aspx

What was quite interesting was that one person from the audience said to interpret the discussion as the well-known fight between: on one side the media that “distracts” the students and on the other side the educational institution, trying to get them to concentrate on something that is important. And the questions that inevitably arise are: How disconnected from the others spheres of children’s life is the school’s content? How to build up a communication between those two worlds? And even further, does this institution no longer supply the kind of training that children deserve?

So, if the school insist in making children memorize stuff that has nothing to do (and maybe never will) with their routines, what the school should be teaching then? Or even better, how should be teaching? How may we transform an educational system that sometimes seems as an “industrial production” into something more personal and human?

Ted Robinson already proposed some interesting ideas at TED and the movie The Class, also brings some arguments for the discussion (both links below). I usually tend to completely agree with them, assume quite a radical point of view and understand that probably the desired education for children won’t come from the old system. But by the end of the lecture, Livingstone surprised me (and actually she was surprised herself). She told us how she asked the kids if they liked to be levelled by the school (kids are levelled between better and worst performance according to an ideal) and how they enjoyed the idea that now they could play football at school (an effort from school to offer other opportunities for education and creativity). The surprise was the answer that she got. They said that they didn’t want to play football at school and enjoyed being levelled: “at least we know what we are being levelled for”. To the kids, to know what was expected from them was a kind of security. And it’s funny, because when we think that we should stop levelling and start "gaming", they tell us that our job is to put them into levels and their jobs is to find their matches and games outside the school tradition. After all, independence and originality is a conquest or a given?