John Seely Brown on Learning as Tinkering

One of the 12 schools I attended as a child was a one-room school. I was the only child in grade 6,  and all the teacher did was to give me the grade six books and some tests. I finished by Christmas, so she gave me Grade 7 to work through by the end of the year. There were only 13 kids in the school, in the back woods of Nova Scotia, but they represented every grade from Kindergarten to 6. I was often pressed into service helping children in grades 4 or 5 with their work. It didn’t seem to do me any harm in terms of achievement in grade 8, when we were all bussed to a new consolidated school.

John Seely Brown, in an interesting video on YouTube (“Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge Production”), suggests that we need to go back to the operating methods of the one room school, where the teacher mentors and supervises, but doesn’t really teach in the front of the class kind of way. And, where learners help other learners.

Certainly I learned in that school that I could learn without much help, and that I could teach others. I also got strapped by the teacher for being late one day, and the older kids learned about things at recess that we weren’t part of the curriculum (what John Seely Brown calls “stolen knowledge” in The Social Life of Information.  Without romanticizing the one room school, we should remember that learning is not dependent on teachers presenting information, but on the opportunities to tinker and show others what we have learned. 

Both Christopher Sessums and David Lee have nice commentaries on this video, that add to the value of the discussion. (GW)

tinker, teacher, learner, why | e e learning | David Lee | 26 February 2009

(GW)

Tagged as: John Seely Brown, learning, Schools