RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms
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This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.
I don't think Robinson's material will prove surprising, but I hope it proves engaging and even fun in this animated format. (Fun being a very serious topic; animation, in the fullest sense, being the object of our enterprise as teachers, yes?) And, if you disagree or find the models insufficient or simplistic, the play of mind may prove worthwhile anyway and should set up meaningful discussions.
I am finding this illustrated presentation on educational paradigms and divergent thinking useful in considering how I want to plan my next semester's classes. I like the emphasis on the arts, but I also like that Robinson named mathematics and science as well. As many instructors in our department have, I've been quietly working with my own students on being academically energized through the popular science texts we're using--Flotsametrics and the Floating World, The Outlaw Sea, The Devil's Teeth--and through Barry Lopez's essays in About This Life, among others. Playful curiosity and comprehensive watchfulness seem useful, fruitful qualities to foster in ourselves and in our students, one reminder that I find in the above animated lecture.
How (and how well) have our own "divergent thinking" skills survived in the face of the "educational system" that we have experienced, surmounted, and served these past years? Luck? Childlike play? Engaging that playful curiosity on behalf of research and teaching tasks? And so forth?
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