My educational vision

Introduction

About 20 years ago I was lucky to start my professional way in the field of informal education. In contrast to the formal educational systems, that area at that time was fulfilled by freedom, openness to changes and new formats, encouraging initiatives, and search for the meaning of education. Thanks to this wonderful pedagogical experience, I’ve got a passion for education for the next few years as well as believes, energy, potential, and vectors for future professional growth. 

The other side of this coin of freedom was total uncertainty and the need to form my own pedagogical visions from scratch: not only learning methods, but also curriculum, content, frames and formats, evaluation criteria, goals, and general approach, of course. Asking myself, colleagues, and students questions became my second nature, a compass for finding my way and a working tool for designing educational approach and methodology suitable for me. In order to illustrate the roots of my educational vision I put several of them in the sequence of their appearance in my professional life, from simple to more complicated, bellow:

• How can I make sense of each meeting and conversation with the participants? 
• What do students need and what are they looking for?
• What is important to learn and teach?
• Knowledge or skills, or both?
• What is my role as an educator?
• What should be the results?
• How can we evaluate the effectiveness of our work?
• What should be the relations between our educational projects and the world around them? How not to create a contradiction (or create mechanisms for solving it) between the values and formats brought by our projects and the reality around them?
• How to prepare teachers to work not in a repressive model, but with respect for the participants?
• How to scale up projects, is it possible?
• How to create and consolidate a sense of the value of skills and knowledge gained during the projects?
• What are the existing theoretical foundations/references of my pedagogical approach and how may I use them to enrich the vision and develop it?
• What is the common “DNA” of all the educational projects that I designed and implemented? What are the key points/values/terms/positions?

Over time, I came up with some practical answers for most of the questions. However, there are others that come back time after time and have to be redefined according to changes happening in the world around us: in technologies, desired content and skills, and the very language of interaction between people, which, especially in the field of education, must correspond and make a touch to the language of the generation.

The main question is still the same: How meaningful learning experience can/has to be created? 

In an attempt to be more specific, I present here my current sub-questions, related more to the connection between education and technology:

1. What is the special role of people interaction and personal contact in the educational process? What, when, and where cannot be replaced by the technical solutions?
2. What is the role of the physical dimension/ space/ practice in the educational process nowadays? How do brick-and-mortar formats affect the learning process, supported by educational technologies? In what cases and for what results is the presence of several people in one physical place necessary and irreplaceable?
3. How to design sharing knowledge processes with educational technologies? What are the internal laws governing the construction of such processes and systems, in which cases they are especially in demand, what can they become an alternative to?

This essay aims to explore the questions and present some answers, related to existing learning theories. I’ll also reflect on the applicability of these answers in the field of educational technologies. The methods of the research are mostly based on my practical experience – reflections and analysis of evaluations, feedback from participants and staff, – as well as on theoretical materials, related to those practices.

My vision

When people ask me about my pedagogical vision I usually use several terms (that I found or invented for myself through years) to explain it. 

The first one in this working glossary is Participatory Learning. I use it to explain the idea of the best way of learning, in my opinion, which is participation, taking part in collaborative creative processes, and making choices, related to those processes, inside them. The world participatory I borrowed from the field of contemporary art, where it’s applying to an art-objects, formed in real-time by the participation of viewers. Thus, the creative process itself is also explored and experienced as an art-object, becoming in its material embodiment a vivid meaningful environment, full of movement, contacts, connections, and changes. There is also a concrete context of actuality provided “here and now” both for and by an author (the initiator) and viewers (participants, co-authors), as well as the feeling of belonging to the creative act.  

I found it very similar to the way I looked on and worked in educational projects, both in principles and design: there the knowledge was created and actualized by a group of people, with the use of relevant semantic content and different physical and artistic materials. Thus, the involvement and participation here were not just a tool for attracting or entertaining students, but one of the most necessary components for the essence of learning.

My other support is the word Energy, by which I explain the power and quality of the learning process, usually using visualizations and sketches. Personally coming from the field of physics, I see every group as a container of potential energy, provided by each and every participant: the resources are their knowledge and personal characteristics, emotions and feelings, expectations and motivations, points of view and passions, images and hidden profiles. Being opened and multiplied by goals, content, and frames of learning, this verity generates a great amount of energy. The question always is only about how we as educators choose to embody the energy: leave it lay underground, fight with it, use it to achieve our own goals, or create a common purpose and meaning. 

It’s quite simple to feel and even measure the energy in the learning process, despite it may seem too abstract. Is there energy in this process? Does it inspire? Does it feel good to be in it? Does it give the motivation to continue learning or do something else? The answers could vary in different cases, depending on the role (teacher or student) and other conditions – and I suppose that taking into account that energy parameter as one of the main characteristics, basics, and checkpoints of learning processes is necessary. I also personally believe that the energy of the educational process should inspire, and that is its natural essence and function in people’s life: human beings strive for discoveries, starting from Eve and the tree of knowledge story. And the main task and responsibility of a person, who is in charge of the learning process, is to enable this desire to be realized, – not to extinguish but to inflate a spark, the fire of the thirst for knowledge. 

I used to operate the words Need and Common Sense a lot. In my opinion, people are able to feel their needs for development and then respond to them by making actual choices, driven by simple common sense – and design by that their unique personality, skills, knowledge. As a child at a certain age who wants (needs!) to listen to fairy-tales for getting through some situations, fairs, questions to the next stage of the development, people of every age often want things that they really need for their existential experience at the moment. I think that awareness about defining and answering the needs, as well as the ability to make choices according to them, has to be the inbuilt part of every learning process, both for participants and teachers. 

Basic principles

There are several principles that I define as a basis, all of them should work at the same time to provide vision implementation:

1. Collaboration and interaction

Meaningful interaction and collaboration on every level of the educational process are the base: while getting and understanding information, commenting and questioning, applying, matching expectations and purposes, reflections, giving, and getting feedback. In learning groups and outside them, with teachers and colleagues, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interaction, collaboration is a necessary component of the learning process and knowledge appropriation. Diversity of views, positions, and identities, provided in the process, is able to make it deeper, more fruitful, but also more complicated for facilitating.  

2. Creation 

The learning process should be creative by essence and bring valuable and tangible results. The ability and need to generate new ideas, comments, deeper understanding, or even artistic works as results, should be an inbuilt part of the methodology of every learning session. That creative process enriches individuals as well as the group, and sometimes also brings interesting refreshes to the learning content field. 

3. Difficulty 

The tension inherent in facing difficulties has tremendous educational potential. The need to stand against and solve the difficulty or conflict provides a great impact on cognitive and social development. Besides, such solutions are anchors and stairs on the path of development and learning – they help an individual not to slide back down the gentle slope, but to cling, to root, and to get deeper into the essence of the subject being studied.

4. Meaningfulness

Victor Franks says that “the greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.” Rephrasing him, I would say that creating a sense of meaning together with participants of the learning process is the most challenging task for an educator. The tools that could help in this case are awareness about feelings and emotions; legitimation of common sense questions; readiness to transparency, sharing, and open discussion; reflections and feedback as special formats, and also as ongoing principles of conversation. 

5. Group process and dynamics

Working in a group is one of the necessary formats of the learning process. A group is a useful tool for organizing many learning processes with the greatest efficiency, but it’s also a unique instrument to provide norms and values, to form a supportive environment, and get into the content deeper. Knowing and using the inner rules of group dynamics, shaping group culture, language, and norms, as well as taking into account the phases of group development is a “magical” tool for effective implementation of learning. 

6. Environment and context

The importance of being related and linked to the possible learning and supportive resources outside of the concrete learning module can be designed at two levels:

1. Creating a supportive environment for the learning modules: additional learning spaces and “buffer zones” with different levels of involvement and obligations, giving the possibility of zooming in and out, getting time out and pauses, support and additional content;
2. Creating supportive connections with reality and the world outside the learning modules: taking into curriculum actual hot themes, designing links to partners and other educational institutions, working on projects and tasks, relevant in the real world.
3.  Pedagogical design based on values

Particular attention should be focused on tacit knowledge providing through the conscious design of values, transmitted by the forms and methods of learning activities. Examples of that phenomena are the construction of socio-educational norms of a group through language, attitudes, assessment criteria, methods, use of space, time constraints, visual language, music, the rhythm of learning. 

7. Fractal approach

Using the same seven previous principles on each level of an education system: while working with directors, coordinators, teachers, and students. The self-similarity principle makes it possible and easy to switch the roles from teacher to student and back, participating in the colleagues’ parallel sessions and creates by that a supportive self-growing learning environment. 

Change over time

The principles and approach that I outlined above developed over time like a drawing: the artist sees and puts the very first sketch on the whole piece of paper, creating by this a basis of composition that he develops later. Then clarifications, color, details, small changes come, but everything is still based on the same the very first sketch.

The main powerful factors of the first years of my educational practice were: a) the mandatory and everyday attitude to the motivation of participants: visiting all the projects was voluntary only – in contrast to school education, for example; b) working within the international group of enthusiastic colleagues from various fields, seeking to contribute to new educational approaches; c) a wide range of ages we worked with – the age of the participants ranged from 6 to 65 years. 

I didn’t have previous knowledge, holistic vision, and high-quality skills, but was full of motivation to change while working as an educator. As a result of that combination, the first years I worked in a teacher-centered approach, trying hard to be useful, meaningful, and also popular, a “cool teacher”. 

The first interesting turn happened when I became acquainted with the methodology of group facilitation. I realized that it has its own laws and rules, methods, and tools that allow you to work not in the teacher-centered approach, and liked it a lot. The next years I was constantly training my facilitator skills, reflected, shared, and explored the theory by books of Carl Rogers, Irvin Yalom, Klaus Vopel, and others. 

The other breakthrough came after several years of work, while I met hermeneutic and artistic pedagogical approaches. Working with a group of philosophers and artists involved in an educational project, I experienced an incredible pedagogical event: 7 days of reading and artistic commenting on texts with a hundred children 6-11 years old. That moment I realized that I knew nothing about the education, real motivation, and abilities of students. 

So, what exactly was going on there? In several words, the whole world was created, and the kids were active co-authors and creators of meanings in it. Every day they read several texts related to each other, played small theatrical sketches based on their comments and ideas, and also worked with some unusual artistic techniques in a creative workshop. The texts were about playing and creativity, rules and mistakes, God and people, life and death, absurd and meanings, meeting and art, and, etc. The final performance was participatory and made by all participants. It lasted about two hours, was an improvisation in many ways, and everybody there embodied at least three roles – a viewer, an author, and an actor or actress, which correlated with the poetic field, provided by text and defined as “Author, Reader, Hero”. 

I have never seen such a beauty of educational program design, as well as meaningful results before. I have also never thought that it’s possible a) to speak on such topics with kids; b) that these themes are really interesting to them; c) to read a lot of texts at all with this age while learning; d) to comment and create art-objects and sketches on the basis of the texts; e) to provide by texts and art so much creative energy: playing and seriousness at the same time. 

That experience was amazing and even quite shocking at the same time, and till now I’m still impressed by it. Thanks to the program I found a deeper interest in the field of education: beliefs in people’s potential and vectors for my future professional development. Since then I have been working a lot under (and with) the methodology of Pedagogy of Art: the intersection of art and education, enriched by hermeneutic, project-based learning, and group facilitation. 

The last important point of my vision upgrade was about knowledge sharing and student-to-student teaching. Several years ago I started experiments with sharing knowledge formats while working with professionals in the pedagogical community of practice and then found it applicable also with other adults, teenagers, and even kids in various frames. Right now I’m trying to develop and apply this methodology nearly in every project I’m involved in.

Relation to the learning theories

My vision and educational approach are mostly formed and influenced by the ideas of social constructivism and existentialism. My understanding of human nature is mostly based on existentialism positions, and at the same time, I find a lot in common between my view on the way of organization of learning activities and social constructivist theory.  

Social constructivism

A lot of my educational beliefs and methods based on theories of social constructivists. 

Thus, 

• I believe that learning is an inherently social practice, that we learn through social interaction;
• I use the great potential of a language for forming a group culture and development of an individual;
• I keep in mind the concept of the zone of proximal development and use it a lot while creating interactions and intersections with a ‘more knowledgeable other’.

The ideas of Lev Vygotsky, one of the brightest educational psychologists who formed the roots of social constructivism, were the platform of my pedagogical thinking from the very beginning. His texts about collaborative practices need for peer work and interactions in class without a teacher, and the importance of play for the development of an individual created a great impact on forming my vision.

Alexey Leontiev, one of the followers of Vygotsky, developed Activity Theory, which I also find related to my vision. It explained the ultimate reason for any human activity in the world by an innate need. A need can be viewed from both a biological and psychological perspective, and having a need means that something “should be present in the environment". From that perspective, need is something that has an orientation toward the world to make a change in the environment — and this is manifested through behavior and subjective experience. Need looks for an object in the external environment, or has it initially and embodies itself through it.

Ideas of the learning environment and, as a result of my interest in this theme, the concept of sharing knowledge formed the other important part of my vision. Philosophers and scientists during all human history defined and explored different types of knowledge, I’ll relate to several ideas about knowledge, provided in the 20th century:

Karl Mannheim (Mannheim, 1997) argues that any knowledge is always rooted in a specific “conjunctive experiential space". Michael Polanyi (Polanyi, 1978) classified human knowledge into two categories and introduced the term “tacit knowledge”:

• Explicit knowledge – is “know what,” the facts and algorithms that can be written down so others can both understand and make use of the knowledge. ”Explicit knowledge can be found in documents”(Wellman, 2009). 
• Tacit knowledge has a personal quality, which makes it hard to formalize and communicate. Tacit knowledge is deeply rooted in action, commitment, and involvement in a specific context. In Polanyi's words, it "indwells" in a comprehensive cognizance of the human mind and body.

Polanyi also defined tacit knowledge as pre-logical phase of knowing. He described it as ‘we can know more than we can tell‘. Following Polanyi’s definition and ideas (that are pretty inspiring for me) we can also find some thoughtful content, presented by Hodgkin. He said, that

“people use a lot of tacit knowledge bits, in an attempt to make sense of something.”

Sharing tacit knowledge seems to be a natural but challenging task at the same time. That it's something that seems as happening all the time but quite difficult to design by purpose. I found the concept of sharing tacit knowledge, provided by Ikujiro Nonaka, related to my vision. Japanese organizational theorist Ikujiro Nonaka provides the concept of commonplace as a learning approach. He called the concept "Ba": in Japanese, it has the meaning of shared space for emerging relationships. "Ba" provides a foundation for advancing individual and collective interchange. This space can be physical, virtual, mental (shared experiences, ideas, ideals), or any combination of them. Thus, the environment is a necessary framework that makes possible and visible generating, sharing, and transmitting tacit knowledge between people. And this, in its turn, leads people to discover more.

Existentialism as an additional perspective 

The fact that existentialism keeps its focus on the whole range of human emotions, and how the human being can create a meaningful life for themselves, makes it very close and related to my learning vision. Existentialism theory gives me additional perspectives and views, that I couldn't find in social constructivist theory:

• The idea of refusing to reduce the human way of being to any particular code, or system;
• The idea of each person's responsibility to themselves and others in the ways that they choose to live and the requirement to act truthfully for ourselves, whilst recognizing human frailty and the contingency of any given truth, to get the meaning, not just according to social norms;
• The freedom of choice and the need to make choices using our own free will. The consequence of this is that educators must teach students the skills to make ethical decisions based on first principles, such as “do no harm” and “treat others the way you wish they would treat you”.
• Education is to contribute in the realization of self (Koirala, 2011)
• Every individual is unique. Education must develop to individual differences (Koirala, 2011)

The practical role of the teacher, described in the existential pedagogy approach, also seems related to me and my practices, as far as I use a lot of group facilitation skills as a teacher:

The teacher has a role in forming the atmosphere governing the class. The teacher presents the students with a proper model for exploiting communication skills through active listening; the teacher welcomes new ideas and so he is also a learner; he helps the learner be independent and responsible through allowing free speech and letting the learner pose open questions and obtain positive and good feelings about his learning experiences. The teacher must be able to create good human and emotional relationships with the students and be honest about his feelings and emotions and he must not impose his wills and tendencies on the students. Although we could not expect students to learn a lot of things through this method, the important matter is that they will learn how to learn.

(...) If proper facilitating conditions are provided the students are able to develop their potential capabilities. The student is affected by his own emotions and lives with the present moment. (Mahini, Yahyaei, 2017)

According to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous book outlining “Existentialism is a humanism”, and there is no power higher than the man in this word. I would say that my values basement is with existentialists, but social constructivist theory gave me a lot of practical tools and points of view that I adopted and combined with existentialism positions. 

Looking for theories, that could possibly combine those approaches also, I referred to psychology, as it often works as a bridge between philosophy and education areas. Interesting, that nowadays constructivism and existentialism often go hand-in-hand in professional development frames for psychologies and teachers. According to Lincoln & Hoffman (Lincoln, Hofman, 2018), constructivism and existential psychology share many important commonalities:

• The concept of meaning, that is central to both schools of thought;
• Value the importance of relationships;
• Human change processes, that are understood as ineffable;
• A preference for subjective ways of knowing combined with caution about claims for objectivity;
• The questioning of the ability to definitively know, particularly in interpersonal matters. 

I personally hope to research the theme of possible connections, intersections, overlapping and combinations of social constructivism and existentialism deeper in the future, for clarification of my learning vision. 

The consequences of vision for educational technology

I can see several interesting points about the use of educational technologies, related to my vision.

1. The first and maybe the most important for me consequence is a critical evaluation of educational technologies. Personally, I’m very interested in technologies, however, I’m not such a fan of immediate use of new technologies, just because we have them and it seems curious or funny to try them in the class. I used to think about using one or another EdTech tool from the perspective of meaning creation: a) does the tool help me to create a meaningful learning environment? b) what are the best tool and the best way of using the tool to create a meaningful learning environment?
2. The second point is my interest in online collaborative learning practices. I believe that, together with limitations, the digital format of collaboration gives a lot of additional options, compared to regular offline collaborative practices. The educational potential and special characteristics, benefits, and limitations of online collaborative learning, provided by different media and technologies, have to be researched and explored in practice. For the moment I’m familiar with some tools, presented in this area, such as programs for cooperative creation: programming, co-editing video, graphics and music, and others, and I’m sure that their number and quality will arise, as they have great educational potential.  
3. One of the most beautiful things about these online collaborative practices is fast feedback, which drives the processes further and also develops the tool itself, in case of that need. The other one is the media itself, which enriches the language of communication (and collaboration) by fast and open access to information of every kind, visual and audio language, gamification, and hyperlinks. Putting together, they create a unique collaborative environment, attractive for learning and further growth.
4. The other point of view on collaborations brings me to the interest in the blended learning theme and researching the area. I started with the idea of the most famous Flipped Model, where collaborative practices mostly stay offline in brick-and-mortar format, and getting information goes online. This makes sense for me, so I was looking for some other models and researches in this field, that would refer to my vision and values. 

So, I found that Thompson and colleagues (2015) suggest that blended learning should increase student engagement ( and that’s close to what I’m looking for) – this is achieved through the inclusion of synchronous and asynchronous student learning, increased collaboration, the provision of assessments (to measure effectiveness) and an increase in supporting materials (Thompson et al., 2015). 

Horn (2017) highlights competency-based learning as one of the main ideas of blended learning formats. The main idea of competency-based learning is that the student must prove mastery in the topic, including the demonstration of skills and knowledge before moving to the next level. Learning through doing is a part of this idea. I found is related to my ideas of the necessity of learning, based on awareness of tacit knowledge also.

As a result of that small research about blended learning, I found out that Vygotsky’s theories found their application in the new environment, with the advent of digital technologies and tools capable of realizing and scaling educational processes. For instance, they were used in the study of computer support for teamwork/learning (Stahl, Koschmann, and Suthers, 2006). 

1. The last, but not the least thing that I find interesting and important in educational technologies as a result of my vision, is about networking and learning environment for educators. Great possibilities to scale up the projects, to use the fractal approach on different levels of communication, and to create communities of pedagogical practice have no limits with technologies. I’m already using those amazing possibilities and hope to develop my practical vision and skills in this field.

Reflections

Aristotle (Aristotle, Bartlett and Collins, 2011) defined Arts (ars, techne) as a special kind of knowledge, among others such as science (episteme), practical wisdom (phronesis), intuition (nous), and wisdom (Sophia). In Aristotle's definitions, I would name pedagogics an Art, maintaining that its nature is craft and art: something that requires an allegation of imagination, feelings, and good practical skills.

The life and the world around us provide changes every single day, and so being an educator becomes a great intellectual and social challenge. I found some basis for myself: I believe in practice and going step by step with awareness and sensitivity on the way of education. Reflections and conversations, looking for meaning and the right next step were good tactics at least for me - the fact that after 20 years of experience I’m still there and full of curiosity and questions, proves it.

I want to conclude the essay by quoting, that comes to my mind thanks to the observing session and somehow represents its essence for me. Louis Kahn, one of the legendary American architects of the 20th century, who designed a lot of educational institutions said once: “Schools began with a man under a tree who did not know he was a teacher, sharing his realization with a few others who did not know they were students”.  I think it’s a good way to describe the very sense of education, in my understanding at least – simplicity and beauty of human interaction, dialog, and sharing of knowledge, that I believe lay in the very basic of every educational activity.

The essay was written for The Theories of Learning course, Tartu University. Teacher: P.Robert-Jan Simons

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