Ecologies that foster intentional learning for the pursuit of excellence in the 21st century

Abstract

Everyday we learn, both as individuals and as members of different communities. There are some learning tasks that are generally found to be more difficult than others. In the learning of academic subjects, how to help students to move from naïve, intuitive understanding to accepted disciplinary conceptions is a research area that is still challenging learning scientists. In the area of teacher learning, a major challenge is how to help pre- and in- service teachers to become reflective practitioners who autonomously engage in continuous cycles of pedagogical innovation and inquiry in order that their students achieve better and/or new learning outcomes. In both cases, a pre-requisite for those kinds of learning to take place is not cognitive or metacognitive, but an epistemological one. I will illustrate this from the discourse data we collected from students and teachers engaged in the Learning Community Projects that were started in our Centre since 2001. I will further illustrate from the research literature on promoting conceptual change and our work with school principals on e-leadership development that the kind of epistemological commitment required is best fostered through intentional learning. Drawing on case studies of pedagogical innovation and large scale survey data collected from two modules in SITES (Second Information Technology in Education Study), an international comparative study of pedagogy and ICT use, it is proposed that an approach which focuses on creating appropriate ecological conditions for intentional learning would be most effective in addressing the key challenges identified in school and teacher education.