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

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TRANSCRIPT
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 your
support 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 my
experience in the education, creative and digital sectors to start a new
conversation about the future of learning. I formed an organisation called
Learning Without Frontiers that during the course of its life brought together a
seemingly disparate group of academics, scientists, technologists, artists, game
designers, lm makers and provocateurs in some of the most challenging
dialogues about our future, why and how we learn. I left LWF in 2012 and
embarked on this journey which gave me the opportunity to reect on these ten
years 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 and
allowing me to challenge every aspect of its creation as well as giving me the
creative and editorial freedoms to make unreasonable demands.
In essence, this working relationship was a microcosm of the challenges that
our global education systems now face in regard to transformation and change
where the things that we did yesterday are under increased scrutiny and
occasionally clash against new ideas that threaten the status quo. It is, however,
through initiatives such as this and indeed the whole WISE programme that we
understand each other better.
The essence of WISE, I believe, is its global inclusivity. Unfettered by the
demands of corporate sponsorships and their implication that theres a sale
involved, the organisation is characterised by the broad community of interest
from 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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the summit and now in the creation of this transmedia book have allowed me to
look beyond my western horizons and solutions towards a global community to
gain a better understanding of what it is to be a learner or indeed a teacher in
often diverse circumstances and cultural backgrounds.
In my opinion it is within this diversity that innovation happens. Whilst
globalisation brings with it many benets we must wrestle with the possibility
of a homogenised culture which will surely impoverish future generations. So
the question is how we can maintain our unique cultural identities whilst
working together to improve the life of every global citizen.
I watched a documentary recently where a well known commentator from the
US educational technology sector was saying that he believed that we would
soon be one race speaking one language. Well, its quite obvious that we have
always been one race but the implication of what he was suggesting isnt my
idea of a utopia. Without diversity there will be no innovation for innovation
surely occurs at the convergence of dierence and alternative thinking
collaborating for a better world.
The digital world and the connected society provides both the space for global
discourse on education, for present and future generations to learn more about
each other, but at the same time the possibilities for a form of intellectual
colonialism that can only diminish our prospects as a species. So how do we
navigate this new frontier?
This project gave me the unique opportunity to meet so many smart and
passionate people from 6 continents, many countries and contrasting
circumstances from refugee camps and crisis response schools to silicon valley
and everything in between.
What I found was that almost everybody was working on part of a jigsaw to
complete what they believed to be the big picture. The real challenge was that
there is yet to be a global agreement on what this big picture actually looks like
and this journey gave me the chance to take a macro look and document the
work of the many thinkers and doers. The result isnt a quantitative study of
whats happening in global education after all the fetishising of evidence based
practice is merely a slogan to suppress rhetorical opposition. What you have
here is a qualitative study presented in multiple mediums that are the voices,
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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 witnessed
something that I regarded as truly transformational and my answer is that every
person interviewed and every case study I visited held some of the clues to
transformation and that many were transformational within their own context
but we must recognise that such transformations are dierent from how, say,
Amazon has transformed retail or Netix has transformed television or
Facebook the way we communicate. Education, like religion, is a powerful
structure designed to reinforce the status quo and until our foundation shifts it
is 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 achieving
greater eciencies and measured outcomes that reinforce centuries of teaching
practices and assessment methods.
Until the business model of assessment is disrupted, like the way other sectors
have 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 will
transform education systems on a global scale?
The most impressive examples of schools and approaches to learning, and I saw
this in the nearly every case study on all continents, was the adoption of
principles dating back to the 19th century and John Dewey. Dewey suggested
rather than the curriculum dictate the direction and the outcome of education
that it would be the self-realisation of the child themselves that would be the
goal.
The most exciting schools and places of learning that I visited where those that
used Dewey principles in the form of project based learning, where disciplines
werent silod into 1 hour chunks of fact memorisation for later recall. It was
learning by doing with the measurement being what was created at the end. The
problem is that todays assessment methods, despite advances in so many areas
of our lives through digital, are unable to cope and so a childs future is
determined in an examination room in solitude with pen and paper. This is
baing and we will one day look back on this, I hope, with ridicule.
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I wonder what might happen if we as a global community drew up a list of the
biggest challenges facing our species and then used this as blueprint for
designing our education systems. Would Gross National Product really be at the
top of the list?
Last week whilst I was entertaining the rst lady at the United Nations we
learned that the men in white coats got their numbers wrong and that by the
end of this century there would, in fact, be 11 billion people on this planet with a
70% chance of continuous growth rather than the 10 billion plateau previously
predicted. We also know that climate change is a reality and that our antibiotics
will stop working. Furthermore we know that the world is only worth saving if
there is joy, love and happiness.
The strategy of keeping the Middle-East at war and Africa poor and diseased is
no longer tenable to the wellbeing of our species.
The clock is ticking, I think that it is time that we started lifting this together
and that, my good friends, is what this book is ultimately about.
And with that I want to pass the stage to Newsha Tavakolian whose incredible
photographic art illustrates this project. Not only was she brilliant to work with
she was constantly challenging my views and as a result I can honestly say that
the result is a genuine collaboration between writer and photographer. To live
and work together taking long haul ight after long haul ight for months on
end, seeing each other in our most jet-lagged state, and never having a single
argument was in itself an achievement and I am honoured to call Newsha a
friend.