Keynote presentation at TRANSit Summer School, Heraklion, Greece (30 June 2013)

1. Be Creative, Play Digitally
Creativity. Discovery. Games. Learning
Summer School
Heraklion, Crete, 30 June 2013

2.  Transformed planet
 Transforming educational systems
 The Inclusion Imperative
 Policy to best practice – innovation and
sustainable values

3.  Globalization – accelerating and pervasive
 Crisis and re-structuring
 Devaluation of the public sphere
 Stratification and inequity
 Labor market transformation
 Rights and inclusion – token or real?
 Access, quality and innovation in education

4.  Patterns of constant change
 Permanent migration mobility
 Outsourcing
 Flexible structures and modalities
 Obsolescence of job norms
 Knowledge economy
 Ecological pressures
 End of certainty

5.  Innovation supporting learning
 Innovation supporting work
 Re-evaluation of traditional methods and structures
 Changing needs
 Analyzing and responding to impact of globalization
 Change without changing – innovation with
precedents
 Facing new realities – using evidence

6.  12 m.: numbers with more than $1m. to invest (9,2%
increase since 2011)
 $46,2 trillion: aggregate wealth of this group (10% increase
since 2011)
 Ultrarich (>$30m.) surged 11% (now 35,2% of all millionaires)
WorldWealth Report
RBCWealth Management & Capgemini Financial Services
June 2013

7. We are increasingly becoming a winner takes all
economy… over recent decades, technological
change, globalization and erosion of the
institutions and practices that support shared
prosperity have put the middle class under
increasing stress

8.  Decreasing workers’ share in national income
in all countries
 Labor productivity (up 85% since 1980) not
reflected in wages (up 35%)
 Declining social mobility
 Rising income inequality reflected in
declining equality of opportunity
GlobalWage Report 2012/13, ILO
Prof. Miles Corak, Journal of Economic Perspectives 2013

9.  Persistence and increase in inequality
 Permanent hopelessness of excluded
 Embedded violence
 Internal underclass
 Social polarization
 Stripping away rights
 Invisibility, ethnic difference and the retreat
to denial

10.  End of old certainties
 No return to ‘normal’
 Polymorphic media and postmodernism
 Planet of Slums (Mike Davis): hypercities of the future
 Informal economies
 The normalization of brutality

11.  Mythology of the ‘normal’
 Defining the mainstream: what have we become?
 Robust probing of social structure required as a
preliminary to defining mainstream
 Masking power, relationships and inequity
 Need to avoid cliché and assumptions
 Learners are immersed in and emerging into this
changed constellation – of which the gatekeepers
know little

12.  Education is both structure and process
 Aims and goals vary considerably
 Education systems mirror world, society and
relationship-matrix of which they are part
 Education systems are as much constraining
as liberating
 Forum for ideas or market for products?
 Or both….?

13.  Traditional schooling in the spotlight
 Learning systems both reflect and lead society
 Information…wisdom…understanding
 Critical enquiry - back to Illich
 Reflection and inquisitiveness
 Engaging with difference

14.  Commodification of knowledge
 Impact on education systems (Freire, Illich,
Field)
 Impact on work (Braverman, Haraszti, Davis)
 Impact on community - alienation and
anomie
 From community to networking
 Knowledge and learning now centrally linked
as product and process dimensions

15.  Miller (2003) fundamentally optimistic about
transformational potential of new knowledge
architectures
 Carneiro (2007) identifies
Paradigm shifts (industry-globalization-utopia)
Delivery modes (role-access-customized)
Driving forces (State-market-community)

16. Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the
living sea of waking dreams, Where there is
neither sense of life nor joys, But the vast
shipwreck of my life's esteems; And e'en the
dearest--that I loved the best-- Are strange--nay,
rather stranger than the rest.
John Clare (1793 – 1864)

17.  Conservative
 Strict
 Hierarchic
 Inflexible
 Memorization and recall focus
 Examination-driven
 Resistant to application of new
technologies

18.  Pupil/learner centered
 Competence driven
 Community focused
 Technologically enhanced
 International engagement focus
 Learning process (application modes)
 Individual value (humanistic approach)

19.  Disruptive classroom behaviors
 Absenteeism
 Early school-leaving
 Teacher burnout
 Migration, integration and sustainability
 Literacy, numeracy, basic skills
 Languages
 Quality and governance
DG EAC (2008) European Education andTraining Systems in the Second Decennium of the Lisbon
Strategy, NESSE and ENEE.

20. Five key issues:
1. Measures to reduce early school leaving
2. Priority education measures in relation to
disadvantaged pupils and groups
3. Inclusive education measures in relation to pupils
with special needs
4. Safe education measures in relation on the
reduction of bullying and harassment
5.Teacher support measures.

21. ‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.’

22. Social inclusion can be defined as a number
of affirmative actions undertaken in order
to reverse the social exclusion of individuals
or groups in our society
INCLUSO (EU 7th Framework, 2009)

23. A multidimensional process of progressive social
rupture, detaching groups and individuals from
social relations and institutions and preventing
them from full participation in the normal,
normatively prescribed activities of the society in
which they live.
H. Silver, Social Exclusion: Comparative Analysis of Europe and Middle East Youth,
Dec. 2007. (Wolfensohn Center for Development, Dubai)

24.  Not necessarily benign
 Not necessarily desired
 Not necessarily valued
 Inclusion or conformity?
 Exclusion often seen minimally as lack of
access
 Exclusion is a systematic policy of inequality
and denial of rights
 Hugely different implications

25.  If learning, working and production are controlled
inclusion is at best token, at worst sinister
 At the core of inclusion must be ability to assess
critically and express freely
 Fundamental to inclusion is ability to ask questions
that challenge existing relations
 Inclusion re-examines existing reality while posing
viable alternatives

26.  Youth and mass unemployment
 Demographics: ageing and life expectancy
 Women and labor market participation
 Immigration, cultural and religious difference
 Disability
 Conflict, stress, anomie
 Urbanization, dissent and democratic deficits

27.  Legacies of segregated schooling
 Gender
 Disability
 Religion
 Ability
 Language
 Class
 Not always negative
 Protection and nurture
 Resistance to assimilation
 Hotbed of innovation
 Risk takers in ’the murder machine’ (Pearse
1916)

28.  Positive and proactive decision – policy and
practice
 It is achievable
 Risks: stigmatization and discrimination
 Requires whole-school and community
commitment and support
 Demands resources (personnel and training)
 Demands facilities to UD level throughout
 Support, review, standards

29.  Inclusion changes both sides – the act of
mainstreaming is to change the mainstream
not the ‘excluded’
 From objects to subjects
 Narratives of adaptation and discovery
 From target group to citizen
 Critical role of teachers
 Inclusion and the dialectic of rights

30.  Transformational learning and the sociology
of innovation
 Educational systems as networks of actors
who reinforce each other in stable
configurations
 Stable configurations prevent change
 Vested interest acts against innovation and
inclusion - seen as threat

31.  It is possible to have incremental change
 Systems react to change even if they do not
initiate it
 The promising path is through disruptive
innovation which produces irreversible
change (Christensen, Disrupting Class, 2008)

32.  Acceleration
 Collaboration and networks
 Collaboration with knowledge production
centers
 Increasing domination by market realities
 Towards competence
 Integrated learning for integrated learners

33.  On-line courses
 Pilot school innovations
 Project based learning
 Experimental schools in degraded social
communities
 Non-formal learning
 Abolition of the teacher

34. να το νι κι
Για ...
λει δες να ‘ναι στους ς
λει μα τους.
A Solitary swallow and a costly spring,
for the sun to turn it takes a job of work,
It takes a thousand dead sweating at the wheels,
it takes the living also giving up their blood.
Elytis, Axion Esti

35.  Community development
 Social solidarity
 Environmental management and
conservation
 Arts, culture and creativity
 Sports and leisure
 Health and well-being
 Social inclusion and demographic change
 Advanced technologies

36.  From oppression to emancipatory learning
 Insights of the excluded - voices of the invisible
 Learning to think – and teach – anew
 Creating benefit for all
 Critical thinking distinct epistemologies of
science and engineering
Science explains what exists; engineering creates what never
existed (Von Karman)
 Disability and learning: from Louis Braille to Ken
Robinson

37.  Innovation and creativity as starting point not
destination
 Responsiveness to permanent change
 Staff competence and empowerment
 Engaging with excellence
 Doing the unexpected - better!
 Content validity and academic rigor
 Customer delight

38.  Increased application of new knowledge
 Open and distance learning technologies
facilitating learners and staff competence
 Transformation of traditional teaching role to
mentoring, guiding and facilitation
 Development of network of inclusion best
practice at European level
 Adopting UDL
 Inclusion not as destination but starting point

39.  Removing barriers - mind and heart
 Asserting imagination and creativity
 Limitless potential of the inclusion focus
 Learning for all as foundation for
transformation
 From the core of crisis – new directions or the
abyss?

40. Dr. Alan Bruce
ULS Dublin
abruce@ulsystems.com