Nov
2013
SEDA’s 18th annual conference Cultivating creative learners in higher education: is it too late? Professor Guy Claxton
Guy has an interest in epistemic knowledge and teaching for the development of creative minds in students for longer term impact. The aim in building learning power in students is to get good results by building confidence, capacity and appetite for creative learning. Guy used the metaphor for a classroom in this context which was it was a fitness centre and the lecturer/teacher is a learning coach. The process of creative teaching is making small cumulative modifications to teaching habits and the learning culture.
Learning worth its salt is difficult, slow, uncertain, error strewn, emergent and innovative and requires resilience, patience, imagination, collaboration, self-evaluation and courage.
The rationalistic view of HE is:
- It’s all about transmission of knowledge
- Knowledge leads to expertise
- Student learning is intellectual and incremental
- Lectures are primarily knowledge transmitters
- Universities are the “cathedrals of intelligence
A complementary view is:
- HE is not the mastery of complex bodies of knowledge, it is the development of professional and scholarly habits of mind
- Universities are collections of epistemic “ communities of practice” with students as “new comers” and professors as “old-timers”
- Students serve an epistemic apprenticeship
Layers of apprenticeship
- Knowledge- fact, theory, precedent
- Domain specific skills
- Generic habits of mind
- Attitudes – “role of intuition”
- Values and interests
- Identity
An epistemic craftsman wonders, critiques, researches, stores, imagines, collaborates and story-tells.
We should be looking at students as apprentice researcher/professionals.
What could we do to support this process as lecturers, is:
- Tell the truth about learning/discovery
- Model wondering, not knowing
- Use more “could be” language
- Time to iterate and improve
- Make it safe to wonder
- More problem/project-based learning
- Encourage collaboration and critique
Scholarship is a craft, like gardening, jewellery-making etc , it can be humdrum as well as virtuoso.
You can visit the following website for more information on this http://www.buildinglearningpower.co.uk