Rearticulating identity and community in a global society
The convergence of participatory media culture, diverse diasporic movements (the formation of dispersed populations that share common roots and identity), and frameworks for creating new commons (bottom-up means of managing shared resources) set the stage for re-articulating identity and community in a global society. Education will find itself a contested resource in the crossroads of these forces of change. It will become part of the civic discourse in multiple new kinds of public forums and spaces as “educitizens” make visible the status of schools and of educational decision-making, resources, and activities in their communities. School administrators, district level staff, and teachers will need to learn how to communicate and interact in a bottom-up world of engaged educitizens.
- What kinds of roles can educators and schools play in an increasingly transparent world with more bottomup monitoring of learning?
- What kinds of public, visible dialogues should educators be catalyzing?
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The convergence of participatory media culture, diverse diasporic movements (the formation of dispersed populations that share common roots and identity), and frameworks for creating new commons (bottom-up means of managing shared resources) set the stage for a re-articulation of identity and community in the global society. Education will find itself a contested resource, right and experience, in the crossroads of these forces of change.
Diasporic flows of learners will bring new layers of complexity to defining rights and responsibilities around education and learning. Climate refugees (such as those who experienced Katrina), families of global corporate employees, global immigrants, growing numbers of homeschoolers and online learners, and religious communities comprise new groups of learners with distinct learning values, conceptual frames of education, and a sense of rights as learners.
These diverse values and conceptions of education and learning will be reflected in their personal learning ecologies - networks of resources, tools, and learning assets that families stitch together to support their children’s education and development.
Educitizens - equipped with camera phones, mobile blogging, and social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, web logs) - will leverage participative media and new civic literacies (digitally mediated collective processes of creation, debate, expression, and organization) to surface tensions and articulate perceived rights to education and learning. They will act to build learning commons, as in Washington DC where DC Voice works with citizen volunteers to audit their public schools for readiness in a publish results for the community. They treat their schools as a new commons - a shared resource that benefits the entire community. And recall that the first image of the Virgina Tech shooting that the world witnessed was a camera phone image taken by a student witness on campus and sent to CNN.
As communities develop increasing levels of transparency through citizen generated data and exchange, local schools and the robustness of a community’s learning landscape will come under the spotlight, exposing learning deserts (those area barren of resources and experiences that support healthy development and learning) and learning oases (robust geographies with ample opportunities that support community learning and regeneration.
Implications for Learning
Education will increasingly become part of the civic discourse as educitizens bring transparency to the status of schools, educational decision-making, learning and health resources, and activities in their communities.
- School administrators, district level staff, and teachers will need to learn how to communicate and interact in a bottom-up world of engaged educitizens.
- Social media tools and the explosion of citizen-based mapping create new opportunities to make public the relationships among issues such as economic success, health, and education.
- Such public exposure of critical issues can help rally shared the interests of the broader, enabling a collective commons for learning and a new form of public legacy.