#fluidlearning

Last week was my long-awaited, first presentation of Fluid Learning (FL) to teachers. My presentation concluded a Personalised Learning Inset session that had been arranged by trainee headteachers at Barham Primary School in Wembley, Jayshree Thakore and Baljinder Barum.

I’d met with Jayshree and Baljinder prior to the Inset to discuss what they intended to deliver to the teachers - an interactive session exploring personalisation, retention, application and mastery opportunities (PRAM) for each individual child. The personal element of this tied in nicely with my concept of FL which I then explained. It was heartening to receive such an enthusiastic response from experienced members of the field, and even more so to find that I’d inspired them to model the Inset around the FL structure.

The Inset session was a great display of the versatility of FL. Jayshree and Baljinder implemented it well, with the teachers  discussing the given areas of PRAM and really engaging in the response stage where they had a range of materials to create physical representations of their thoughts. One group even scripting a short role play.

We ended with my presentation of FL; I explained what had driven me to develop the concept and how one would facilitate a FL session, it was essentially a call to volunteers to trial it with their class. I’d left it open for any teachers to get in touch with me if they needed any assistance with the facilitation in their own time, however the teacher of the EAL class approached me at the end of session. Being a school based in the most multicultural borough of London, if not the UK, there are a large number of learners of English as an additional language (EAL); Laura Alexander teaches the EAL class at Barham and considered FL to be a good learning format for these children. She explained that the current FL topics may be too advanced for them however this could be adjusted with some foundational topics instead. I agreed, FL should be adapted to cater to the participants. I’ll be going back to Barham in the new year to work with Laura on facilitating these sessions with her class.

My presentation of Fluid Learning didn’t receive immediate responses of teachers keen to start using it the next day, probably due to the Inset being held at the end of a long day of teaching. Despite this, we garnered some pleasing feedback left on post-its: some mentioned the emphasis on ownership of learning and fluidity in learning; others mentioned the autonomy in individual research styles and presentation or response mediums; and finally, that FL had been thought-provoking and inspiring. This final point is key to me, being able to create a spark in the regular thinking processes of these teachers is what I ultimately intended. Setting in motion a shift in the approach to learning for the future of digital natives.

An innate human inclination is to learn; intended or involuntary, it’s something we do every day. It’s a key part of our experience as living organisms however I feel our attitude towards it has become that of a commodity. Centres for learning - educational institutions - exchange fees for knowledge. We gather information as a resource and are given qualifications to prove our attainment. Post-industrial society does require this to an extent, however a blanket approach to the majority of learning in this way will hinder our experience. 

The quantification of all information creates a facile representation of life - this simply cannot portray all aspects of the human experience. The vast, globally connected bank of this, is the internet. Bytes, comprising of ones and zeros, link people to each other and the stores of information that cover every subject matter imaginable. It grows continuously while becoming increasingly intertwined with our lives. The collaboration of knowledge this relationship facilitates has spurred an exponential shift in our evolution. An example being: a one-off incident fifty years ago that may have been experienced by those in the vicinity and passed on by media outlets, can now be observed and discussed amongst a global audience immediately after it occurs. I believe this new characteristic of information allows the opportunity to reassess our approach to learning. Learning as a means of exploring the human experience; an individual growth that involves stages of progression, and regression, which form our perceptions of the world and inform our interactions with it. 

This is at the core of my Fluid Learning sessions which I hope to introduce to local primary schools for teachers to begin to employ regularly with their classes. Critiquing the state of the education system and it’s attitude to learning can only be useful if followed by an action - in this case, an attempt at intervention. This practise of gathering information and then acting upon it is another critical aspect of the sessions which are to be initially presented to 10 and 11 year olds. My own practice of imagining ideals and then designing real-life interventions to address them, is a key element of merging the virtual plane of the internet with the physical plane of day-to-day life. Creating more human experiences from those ones and O’s, one step at a time.