Professional Practice

Practice as a form of action based on the codified experience of a field combines with the work of professional thinking by educators to design educational environments that permit people to make optimum use of the pedagogical resources at their disposal. Here educators interact in the daily work of education. Here is the emerging system of digital pedagogy in operation. How should educators organize their conduct to enable people to fulfill the best possibilities inherent in their capacities and their conditions?

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One of the powerful predictors of how children fare in school is the educational attainments of their parents. This predictor holds across cultures, languages, races, ethnicities. It poses a difficult challenge. In populations where the educational attainments of parents are low, how can their children achieve educational excellence? To answer this question, we need to ask another. Why is parental educational attainment such a powerful predictor? The reason is not obscure. Parents with significant educational attainments have better insight into the processes of formal learning and the strategies for success at it, and they are more likely to surround their children with intellectual resources and helpful suggestions that prove supportive. In a myriad of subtle ways they pass their experience to their children. Parents who have not been successful in this formal schooling may pass on other kinds of knowledge that largely go unrecognized by the school culture. The challenge before us is to find a means to bring these ways of knowing together and to empower parental influence for all children in the processes of schooling. [Note 95]

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Use of networked technologies, combined with a strong community of people learning together, can alter this cycle of failure that our educational structures, inadvertently perhaps, have so-consistently helped to arrange. Throughout the twentieth century, educational and social services have been highly segmented and specialized. Segmentation is everywhere. Elementary schools serve children, aged 5 to 12, dividing them all up according to annual age cohorts. So too with the numerous other segments of the learning society – high school, middle school, adult education, job training, college, counseling, and so on. Schooling and other community services all occur in separate spaces because the information resources and specialists necessary for each different function have required a distinctive location and deployment. The information technologies of the twenty-first century change these conditions. The resources needed to sustain numerous different educational functions simultaneously in any place of congregation become ubiquitous. Far from distance learning taking education out of the school, new media make the school a community in which all ages, all interests, and all needs can again join together to pursue all aspects of human development in a shared and common space.

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Hypothesize that this ubiquity of diverse educational resources permits educators to break the cycle of reproduction in educational attainments. Parental empathy with their children’s processes of learning expands as the parents are fully engaged in learning themselves. So, too, with teachers and the surrounding community. The school, a nurturing, enclosing space wired to draw sustenance, stimulus, and collaboration from the entire world, should increasingly take on the characteristics of a learning community; comprising children, their parents, and professionals of all sorts, including researchers, scientists, and scholars as well, all of whom are engaged in serious efforts to extend their education further and to participate in the common intellectual enterprise. To prototype such a learning community and to show its potential power in breaking the cycle by which patterns of educational attainment reproduce themselves from generation to generation, imagine a digital learning community in which all members – students, teachers ,administrators, and parents – continuously work in collaboration with each other to pose difficult questions and to work on answering them with the full intellectual apparatus of the culture. Networked technologies and continuing involvement with other learning communities, universities, and public interest groups enable each community and each participant to have access to the resources and assistance to make headway on such goals. This learning community becomes the locus of universal participation in the work of culture.

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Advanced information technologies make construction of integrated learning communities far more feasible than ever before. The ideal of parents and children, teachers and community members joining together in the shared nurturing of their human potentials is not new. It has been a difficult ideal to actualize, for the resources that can help the child take first steps in the course of education differ from those that can help the parent, or the specialist, or community member. Networked technologies make it possible, through a single location and all at once, to engage a diversity of people with challenging learning activities, providing each with appropriate resources and useful intellectual tools. Educators can construct such learning communities in the extended present in which we now work. To achieve the potentialities of a new educational system, educators must break the cycles through which educational institutions, despite endless intentions to the contrary, have perpetuated patterns of privilege and disadvantage. To be a significantly new system, the emergent system must stop reproducing accidental inequalities. This is the challenge, a challenge educators now can meet, and one they must meet now.

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Over several centuries, educators have built the meritocracy of print. Let us put aside the traditional image of the educational ladder, with children clambering, rung by rung, up the sequence of grades, some falling off as drop outs, more and more scaling the whole way to college graduation, walking thereafter the plateau of middle-class affluence, and a few going higher still, up to the rungs of advanced knowledge and professional power. Instead of the educational ladder, let us image a learning community, warm and surrounding, with its youngest children entering at its very center and then rippling outward as they grow through a series of concentric circles, with parents, teachers, and other adults ringed around them, with lines of interactive communication, both tangible and virtual, linking all, from the center of these circles out, joining them in reciprocal interaction with the full range of cultural institutions and all the specialized resources of global humanity. These learning communities pulsate with mutual support, bathing all in sustaining fluids rich with ideas, images, resonant voices, bracing criticism, and animating hopes. Here it is no longer that some have much and others little. Here each partakes from the richness of the whole and each adds back the full fruits of his or her abilities and efforts. These learning communities are the better future we educators now have to make. In constructing these, we forge anew the progressive bond with our posterity.