Viva the Manchester students who are demanding a new curriculum in Economics. After all, before 2008 this was a field of enquiry that embraced perpetual economic growth. Many of the strands of scholarship that were denigrated before the crash are now seen as prescient. As with all disciplines change is, and should be, constant. In my own area of Archaeology, we’d still be teaching Craniology and Eugenics if there had not been disruption to the curriculum.
Speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds participated in different sessions at WISE 2013, exploring current educational challenges and highlighting innovative solutions.
Last week, I was in Doha for the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). The University Presidents’ forum included Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Morocco, Columbia, Uruguay, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Australia and Lebanon. The extraordinary breadth and diversity of Higher Education today gives the lie to the concept of a fixed curriculum and intransigent disciplines. After all, knowledge and learning has always been cumulative, fluid and radical. This is what makes it addictive, and its practitioners obsessive.
There’s been a huge focus on MOOCs as disruptive technologies, with near-panic that the university-as-we-know-it may be swept away. Some have joined the MOOC movement; Cousera, or the new Futurelearn platform. MOOCs encourage and celebrate openness, flexibility and curricula that are assembled in a myriad ways, by tens of thousands of individual participants. There would be an evident contradiction in both embracing MOOCs while at the same time holding onto the notion of a static internal curriculum.
Perhaps, then, one of the lasting effects of the initial MOOC surge will be to establish the principle of more flexible, responsive and disruptive internal curricula. This is the potential of the “flipped classroom”, where learning is no longer about “filling up” students with concepts and information. The new pedagogy will draw its content from the Cloud. Learning will be about the high-level ability to frame and understand complex problems, and solve them. It will also be about recognising that the nature and challenges of these problems change all the time – as the Manchester Economics students have done. New technologies enable and enhance disruptive curriculation, in ways that we have yet to appreciate, often building on the early “connectivist” MOOCs.
An immediate challenge for us - and a cause for passionate advocacy by some of our students - is to put in place a new way of offering Modern Languages.
An immediate challenge for us – and a cause for passionate advocacy by some of our students – is to put in place a new way of offering Modern Languages. Like many other universities, the traditional, rigid curricula for language teaching no longer works. We are now looking at ways of combining modern languages with other threads of learning across the full range of our subject areas. Can languages be constructively disruptive, challenging received wisdom in the same manner that radical advocates argue for fields such as Economics? Given that, for example, non-Spanish speakers are cut off from the vast conceptual riches of contemporary South America, the answer must be yes. English language speakers were a distinct minority at WISE in Doha, and we were all the better for it.
Manchester’s Post-Crash Economics Society says this: “we want more critical theory and reflection to be included …. Those who do a totally different degree but still have a passion to understand these issues are encouraged to get involved”. An apt manifesto in a time of disruptive curriculation.
