The Life, Death & Resurrection of Progressive Education

The Life, Death & Resurrection of Progressive Education
Challenges and Dilemmas in Relation to 21st Century Learning

Susan Groundwater-Smith

Susan Groundwater-Smith, University of Sydney

Susan Groundwater-Smith is an honorary Professor in the Division of Professional Learning at the University of Sydney. She is convenor of the Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools, established to engage in ongoing systematic practitioner enquiry.  She works with a range of universities in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands and has published widely in practitioner research: including Groundwater-Smith, S., Mitchell, J., Mockler, N., Ponte, P. & Ronnerman, K. (2013) Facilitating Practitioner Research. London: Routledge.

Life: This seminar will trace progressive education practices at the beginning of the 20th Century as espoused in the publication of John and Evelyn Dewey’ s work on The Schools of Tomorrow, through to innovations in such places as the UK, culminating in the Plowden Report, Children and their Primary Schools.

Death: It will argue that a number of conservative forces have since come together to eventually place limits on imaginative and creative teaching and learning.  Thus the kinds of negotiation and development advocated by educators such as Garth Boomer in Australia where he predicted the need for these skills in Negotiating the Curriculum: Educating for the 21st Century have generally languished.

Resurrection: The discussion will turn to the manner in which writers of international standing, for example Michael Fullan, now argue for generic competencies that include collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking, character education and citizenship as critical for 21st Century learning and pose the questions “so why have we not learned the lessons of the past? and where to from here?”

Challenges and dilemmas: Participants will be encouraged to contribute to a mapping of the challenges and dilemmas that we face within an international educational environment characterised by Pasi Sahlberg as the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) that has brought about unprecedented regimes of audit and accountability that, in turn, bears down upon re-imagining 21st Century learning.

DATE: Wednesday 20 November, 2013
TIME: 10.30am–12pm
VENUE: TC2.66, Faculty of Education, University of Waikato
CONTACT: Please direct queries to Margaret Drummond  [email protected] or telephone +64 7 858 5171.