🚸We are passionate about enhancing education, with a particular focus on education for school age learners.
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Most people would accept that our education systems need to change to reflect the world around them. However, there isn't general agreement about what those changes might look like or indeed what the purposes of education should be in the automation age.
A traditional academic approach would be to carry out research and then publish findings in a refereed journal article. I have a number of concerns about that ...
- academic research is often dependent upon external funding - which often distorts both the research focus and approach (and at times willingness to publish findings)
- the process of publishing academic research findings is generally slow and what gets through the review process may be distorted by views of what counts as high quality research (e.g. by the metrics used in research assessment exercises such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK)
- we already have a great deal of evidence (from theory, practice and research) that is relevant to education - but much of these seems to be ignored. For example, research that I led looking at the implementation of the then government's Information Communication Technology (ICT) strategy concluded that
I was a primary school teacher before moving into academia (teacher education, research, and management). I'm a parent (of 3) and what Papert described as a Yearner.
I have been involved with schools and community settings for many years in various roles as teacher, researcher, writer and parent. On the basis of these experiences, I am fairly convinced that we can be doing this quite a lot better…and that quite a lot of people agree.
Fiona provides strategic education consultancy services to schools and trusts, professional learning providers and EdTech companies. She is also an Associate Lecturer at The Open University, a Founding Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching and sits on the board of a number of multi academy and charitable trusts.
Do you want to contribute to the education debate? If so get in touch via the Contact us link (in the main menu).