Howard Gardner was the keynote speaker at TESOL this year. His talk addressed the impact technology has had on education and the workplace; specifically, he has been thinking about how technology has changed our role as educators.
Gardner has identified four areas in which he believes students will need strong preparation in order to succeed in the world of the future: strength in a discipline, the ability to synthesize, creativity and ethics.
The first point concerns mastery of a discipline. Gardner feels that the acquisition of information used to be a legitimate goal of education, but that technology has changed this. Many students now have extremely efficient "personal assistants" (computers) which can look stuff up and do basic calculations. To succeed in an environment where general information is widely available, Gardner thinks expertise will become a priority-- not just knowing stuff, but mastery of a certain kind of thinking: "What does it mean to think like a historian?" "How would a scientist approach this question?" He encourages teachers to provide these kinds of opportunities for their students.
The second point was about synthesizing information. Again, Gardner seemed to be responding to the flood of undigested information that is available on the web. To take advantage of this resource, it is important that students have the skills to distinguish the useful from the useless and to discern what (if anything) all the data adds up to: students need to be able to determine significance in a sea of information.
Gardner's third point concerned deepening students' capacity for creativity. He made an interesting little jab here about genuine creativity being a challenge in "rule-and-tradition bound" institutions like schools. However, he thinks that succeeding in the 21st century will require personalities that are willing to stretch, break rules and even risk failure. Teachers should be thinking about ways we can develop these capacities in our students.
Finally, he spoke about ethics. Gardner reported that as he travels around the world these days talking to people in education, research, publishing and business, he meets young people who feel pressured by the pace of opportunity. They sometimes say that they can't afford to worry about ethics right now. First they need to "make it," then they can focus on doing the right thing. Gardner feels that whenever possible teachers should share stories of people who faced challenging situations and made ethical choices. He also recommends cautionary tales about people who failed to do the right thing and the costs of that failure.
Gardner has launched a project called Good Work. The mission of Good Work is "to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work: work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society."
Thanks, Sarah. Howard Gardner has done an impressive job of continuing to make relevant contributions to the teaching and learning conversation over the years. During my research into global education, I came across an interesting book chapter that he co-authored ("From Teaching Globalization to Nurturing Global Consciousness" in Learning in the Global Era (2007) Suarez-Orozco, ed). Like most commentators on globalization and education, he mentions the importance of preparing students for "succeeding in the 21st century." However, I appreciate that Gardner offers an alternative to defining this success in economic terms (which is problematically competitive, zero-sum, and unsustainable). Instead, he advances such goals as "greater global sensitivity, more informed understanding, and a more nuanced sense of global self," and he sees helping students develop global consciousness as vital to giving "coherence to otherwise fragmented experience" and "revealing new aspects of our identity in connection to others and to the planet." His orientation may strike some as a bit too "We Are the World," but these are the global education goals that I'd like to see our school embrace.
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