Students taking responsibility for their own learning process
'Journal club: Learning and teaching for an unknown future'
The first journal club on Friday 8 December was dedicated to discussing Ronald Barnett’s 2004 Higher Education Research & Development article on ‘Learning for an unknown future’. The relevance of this article goes without saying as it relates directly to the position of learners and knowledge in today’s and tomorrow’s society, and to the question of how to maneuver pedagogically in a supercomplex world where nobody knows for sure.
In his article, Barnett makes the distinction between complexity and supercomplexity. “Complexity speaks especially to a feature of systems, such that the interactions between their elements are unclear, uncertain, and unpredictable.’ (p249). “Supercomplexity produces a multiplication of incompatible differences of interpretation.” (p249). The uncertainty that comes with supercomplexity, Barnett describes, is a form of uncertainty that arises out of a personal sense that we can never describe the world satisfactorily, let alone act with assuredness in it.
In such a world, our pedagogical task is not an epistemological but an ontological one as knowing (only) produces further uncertainty. We need to educate our students to come to a (personal) position of some security amid multiple interpretations. Even more than knowing and acting, being is pivotal: not so much to learn (how) to dissolve uncertainty, anxiety, fragility, instability, chaos, and alike but to learn (how) to live with them. The skills, behaviours, and attitudes that come with such a learning objective focus on qualities such as self-belief, self-confidence, self-motivation, self-leadership, self-energizing, self-propelling, carefulness, thoughtfulness, humility, criticality, receptiveness, resilience, courage, confidence, stillness, empathy, imagination. “The achievement of qualities such as these call for a transformative curriculum and pedagogy.” (p259).
And ask yourself: are we teaching for those qualities in our curriculums and courses at the moment? And do we know – as engineering educators – what kind of feedback to give to our students about these? Here our exciting journey starts! The design of such a curriculum and the delivery of such a pedagogy are not based on a set of given rules, practices, or ideas. As university teachers, we need to go out there, experiment, and learn ourselves too.
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