Dear Laura, This time I managed to watch the 20-minute Sugata Mitra's video. I was impressed by his suggestions about a new kind pedagogy mainly for remote areas (but not just for them) which should be:digital, fault tolerant, based on group work-learning by doing and watching, connected and self organized. Althoug, I did not quite catch his connection between that and values, I reckon this can be a path to follow in our everyday work with kids and for kids. To my eyes, all Mr. Mitra's speech goes into the direction of an attitude to acquire in order to leave behind the "Victorian" (subconscious) belief that kids' minds are vessels to be filled in. I wonder whether there are schools in the world where these concepts are somehow applied on a regular (and successufl) basis. It would be nice to "study" these cases. Best wishes Mariella
Dear Mariella, I just love this speech… and I would like to know more about real schools applying these strategies as well. As for “values”, I think he talks about the importance of a successful school education in the developing countries – something that won’t affect those countries only, but the whole world. And even if I know generalization is usually not good, I do believe we can apply this idea to our countries as well: a successful (state) school education is the first step towards a brighter future. Maybe it's that I've had such difficult classes these years, but I definitely feel the need of giving all my students the opportunity to succeed - also the "bad" ones. They deserve it. Laura
Dear Laura,
ReplyDeleteThis time I managed to watch the 20-minute Sugata Mitra's video.
I was impressed by his suggestions about a new kind pedagogy mainly for remote areas (but not just for them) which should be:digital, fault tolerant, based on group work-learning by doing and watching, connected and self organized.
Althoug, I did not quite catch his connection between that and values, I reckon this can be a path to follow in our everyday work with kids and for kids. To my eyes, all Mr. Mitra's speech goes into the direction of an attitude to acquire in order to leave behind the "Victorian" (subconscious) belief that kids' minds are vessels to be filled in.
I wonder whether there are schools in the world where these concepts are somehow applied on a regular (and successufl) basis. It would be nice to "study" these cases.
Best wishes
Mariella
Dear Mariella, I just love this speech… and I would like to know more about real schools applying these strategies as well. As for “values”, I think he talks about the importance of a successful school education in the developing countries – something that won’t affect those countries only, but the whole world. And even if I know generalization is usually not good, I do believe we can apply this idea to our countries as well: a successful (state) school education is the first step towards a brighter future.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's that I've had such difficult classes these years, but I definitely feel the need of giving all my students the opportunity to succeed - also the "bad" ones. They deserve it.
Laura