learning to know

Values for a Learning Community
Learning to Know
Paper presented at:
Victorian Principals’ Conference
Melbourne, August,1999
by
Dr Julia Atkin
Education & Learning Consultant
"Bumgum"
Harden-Murrumburrah 2587
02 63 863342 Ph
02 63 863317 Fax
bumgum@ava.com.au
The contents of this paper have been built from a selection of elements of papers published previously such
as: Enhancing Learning with Information Technology,Seminar Series No. 54 and Reconceptualising the
Curriculum for the Knowledge Era – Part 1: The Challenge, Seminar Series No 86
Incorporated Association of Registered Teachers of Victoria,Mercer House, 82 Jolimont St, Jolimont. 3002
Ph: 03 96541200 Fax: 03 9650 5396

COPYRIGHT:© Julia Atkin, 1999
Reproduction of this material for education purposes is welcomed,
providing acknowledgment is made of the source.

Values for a Learning Community – Learning to Know
Values for a Learning Community
Learning to Know
Julia Atkin
Introduction
What are our values for Learning to Know?
• Know WHAT? What is it powerful to learn?
• HOW know? What is powerful learning?
It is tempting to jump in and attempt to articulate what it is powerful to
know for the emerging knowledge era. However it is unlikely that we will
have collective commitment to this if we do not have collective clarity
about our educative purpose for the school years and then design school
education, deliberately, to achieve this purpose.
Educational design is a complex process (Figure 1). The cornerstones for its
integrity are our values and beliefs. The key to its coherence is ongoing
review of the various processes. These key processes include:
• revisiting and clarifying our values and beliefs;
• stating our mission – our educative purpose;
• developing our understandings about how people learn; and
• being responsive to the context in determining what students should
learn in their school learning years.
Over the past thirty years we have deepened and extended our collective
understanding about the nature of human learning, about the nature and
range of human intelligences and we are developing educational practices
that support and enhance learning. Some of our efforts to apply these
understandings about learning seem destined to be thwarted by our lack of
collective clarity about our educative purpose.
Our challenge is to clearly articulate what we value as our educative
purpose, what we value and believe about learning and what curriculum is
an appropriate curriculum to serve our educative purpose for our current
context – the context of the emerging Knowledge Era.
Whose purpose? Political purpose versus educator’s purpose
Having worked closely with many thousands of Australian educators since
the early eighties I believe that the tension felt between their sense of
educative purpose and the political shaping of education has the most
debilitating impact on true professional growth and consequently on the
development of schools as learning communities.
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Julia Atkin
While education in the school age years is largely publicly funded political
forces will continue to shape schooling. Can this tension between
seemingly opposing forces ever be resolved? What good has come from the
politicising of education? What has been detrimental? In order to
reconceptualise the curriculum for the Knowledge Era, it is important to
understand how have we come to be where we are in Western education,
not only to value the gains that have been made, but also to understand the
forces that might hold us where we are and prevent us from moving
forward.
Education Design & Development
Key Elements & Shapers
MISSION
Figure 1 Elements of the Educational Design Process
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PRACTICES
timetable
structure
assessment
strategies
reporting
practices
pastoral
use of program
available
technologies
learning/teaching
strategies
use of
resources
professional
development
program
E
DUCATIO
N
T
E
CHN
OLO
G
Y
RES
OURCE
C
ONST
RAINT
S
WHY school?
What is your educative
purpose?
WHAT should
students learn?
What is essential?
What is desirable?
C
O
NT
EXT
shapes & informs
curriculum
HOW do students
learn?
Principles of Effective
Learning
L
E
ARNIN
G
T
HE
O
RY
LEARNI NG CHARTER
informs
VALUES
&
BELIEFS
design principles
student groupings
learning culture
assessment &
reporting policy
pastoral care policy
nature of learning
experiences
curriculum
offerings
EVALUATION
reflective practice
Ongoing review
© Julia Atkin, 1999
E
DU
C
ATI
ON
AL
A
UT
H
ORI
TI
E
S

An historical perspective
From the beginning of this millennium to the end of the millennium, in
the Western world, we have moved from the Agricultural Era through the
Industrial Era and into the Knowledge Era.
In The Third Millennium School: Towards a Quality Education for Al l
Students (Townsend, 1999:3), Tony Townsend shares a snapshot of the
changing focus of education over this millennium:
In the year 1000, whatever education that did exist was aimed specifically
at the individual. Those who had the good fortune to be involved in
education were being trained to be good individuals with the hope and
understanding that they would be leaders within a community of uneducated
peasants. One could argue that this really lasted for most of the millennium.
By around the 1850s, community pressure was being exerted in many countries
to provide a ‘universal’ education. This started to occur in the second half o f
the last century. By the start of the 1900s, the focus of education had changed
from the development of the individual to the development of whole
communities.
. . . Now people were placed in their ‘rightful’ place in the community on t h e
basis of the level of education they had obtained. This focus of education
lasted for most of the century.
By around the 1980’s, with the emerging global economy, and t h e
technological developments that changed the face of communication, t h e
focus shifted again, from the local to the national. Various countries
distributed reports that linked the quality of education provided to students
with global economic supremacy, so the focus of education moved towards one
that saw education as fulfilling national goals rather than providing for
either the individual student or local communities. . . . Literacy, numeracy,
vocational education and technology became the buzz-words of the decade
and subjects not closely linked to the economy went into decline.
Tony Townsend (Townsend, 1999:3)
In focussing on the developments in Western education Bill Connell
(Connell, 1980) sees the politicising of education as a major trend of the
twentieth century. In the interests of social justice and equal opportunity
universal primary education of the turn of the century expanded to provide
facilities for universal secondary education.
At the beginning of the century primary education was regarded as the form
and level of education suitable for the mass of pupils; secondary education was
for the elite.. . . The proliferation of the middle class, particularly the
growth of the education-hungry salaried and professional middle-class,
brought large numbers of interested pupils to secondary education. By the
1920’s middle class educational expectations were beginning to be shared by
many individuals in the lower classes and the great twentieth century
transformation was beginning
. . . By the 1970s the question of whether to establish sufficient facilities for
universal secondary education in developed countries was settled; the matter,
however, of the most appropriate content for secondary education was not.
Bill Connell (Connell, 1980:8)
At the turn of the last century we had mass primary education which
focussed on learning to read and write and become good citizens, and a
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Julia Atkin
number of changes were starting to occur in secondary schooling around
that time. These include the following:
• To balance the higher socio-economic class orientation of the
private secondary schools, some public selective high schools
came into being and pupils of high-ability were admitted.
• To select these high-ability pupils a scholarship or bursary
examination was held at the end of primary school.
• Students who were not admitted to high school and whose
parents could not afford to pay for private secondary education
went to work and their learning continued informally on the job
and in their communities.
• Students admitted to high school went through a selection process
again at the end of the Intermediate. Those considered to be of
high enough ability went on to study for the Leaving while those
of lesser ability went out into semi-skilled ‘blue collar’ work.
• The Leaving Certificate acted as another filter to select those
considered suitable for further academic study at the tertiary level
that would then equip them for taking their place in the
professions. Those not selected for tertiary study found their way
into the white collar workforce.
The education system, as most of the current generation of educators have
experienced it, was designed to filter and select – Figure 2.
Intermediate
4
Professional
White collar
Blue collar
Unskilled labour
Tertiary
Leaving
Primary
Adapted from Middleton, M. Marking Time, 1981
Figure 2 Education designed to filter and select
The positive outcome of this political shaping of schooling was that it broke
the nexus between post-primary education and socio-economic status and
eventually led to secondary education for all. The negative outcomes are
some of the legacies it has left.
With its focus on selecting the most “academically able students” — as
defined by performance in written exams, on subjects deemed to be
appropriate preparation for tertiary study — this model of schooling has
formed particular attitudes and practices on the part of teachers, students
and society. How might some of these perspectives be characterised, albeit
in simplified ways?

A teacher perspective
Teachers tend to have a focus on “teaching” rather than “learning”, and
might say/believe things like. .
• Some students can learn, others can’t.
• “This student shouldn’t be in my course.”
• “If a student is not learning well it’s because they are not working
hard enough or they are simply not bright enough.”
Subjects that did the most effective filtering job (using written exams) were
accorded the highest status.
A student perspective
Students might say/believe things like. . .
• “I’m no good at . . . “
• “Some are born smart, others are not and there is nothing much you
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can do about it”.
The most exclusive professions tend to be considered the most worthwhile,
and there is an inclination to follow careers they get the marks to get into
rather than that for which they might have a sense of ‘vocation.’
A society perspective
Success is publicly perceived in terms of the ability of the child or school to
achieve high scores in formal assessments.
Practices adopted
Some of the practices include:
• curriculum content shaped by preparation for University;
requirements;
• streaming
• norm referenced assessment, ranking
• learning driven and shaped by written assessment which led to an
attitude that learning was not valid nor valuable unless it could be
assessed by a written examination;
• judgements of worth having to be objective and quantifiable, since
assessment was used to select. This resulted in what is measurable
becoming most important whereas we know quite well . . . “Not all that
can be counts can be counted, and not all that can be counted counts.”
• “League” tables comparing school performance on formal assessment
and equating school success with performance on public exams
As Bill Connell states:
“. . . the requirements of examining bodies, usually external to the school, were
tending to dominate school work, dictating the aims of the school and
determining much of its curriculum.”
Bill Connell ( Connell, 1980:10)

Julia Atkin
In the last 30 years, curriculum and educational practices have largely been
redesigned in the early childhood, primary and early secondary years of
schooling, and we have begun to escape the constraining legacies of the
‘filter and select’ model, but filtering and sorting, with a focus on University
preparation, is still a very strong force shaping senior school learning and
curriculum.
It has also had the effect of devaluing learning to know:
• for life
• for work
• for creative self expression
• even learning to know for knowing's sake.
A more holistic view
Sometimes we can see the nature of a situation more clearly and more
holistically if we step outside it and look at it metaphorically. When asked
to think of learning as an image or analogy people respond with a variety of
metaphors that give us insight into the nature of the learning process and
the impact of the learning process. Over the past ten years I have asked over
150,000 people to think of learning metaphorically. The dominant
metaphors that emerge from their responses are ones of:
• journey
• growth
• construction/reconstruction – creation/re-creation
• transformation
• enlightenment/empowerment/enrichment
The nature of the learning process is one of growth, journey and
construction/reconstruction. As a result of learning the person is
transformed — they are more enlightened, more empowered, more
enriched. When people elaborate on the “journey” metaphor, they do not
see it as a simple trip between two points. Rather they see learning as a
lifelong, open-ended journey. Sometimes there are signposts, while at other
times you might come to a fork in the road that is not sign-posted;
sometimes there are potholes in the road — travelling is bumpy; sometimes
there are steep inclines, either up or down and just when you think you’ve
reached the summit you glimpse another horizon.
Contrast this notion of ‘journey’ with the story of an Australian travelling
through the USA. In conversation in the deep of the night on a Greyhound
Bus he revealed that he had only two more States to go and he could say
he’d been to every State in the Union. He had just travelled through Utah
completely in the dark!
The experience of many teachers teaching in the Senior years can be likened
to our Australian traveller. Many of the students are not on the trip to
develop a deep understanding of the places along the way — they are
motivated by finishing the trip and scoring the highest points possible. The
itinerary (curriculum) is packed full, the time is limited and they perceive it
6

is the teachers job to make sure they finish the trip. The result is that many
students travel it all in the dark and end up in the dark. The focus is on
finishing the trip not on the quality if the journey.
“That’s not true for everyone!” no doubt will be the reply. No, it’s not true
for everyone. Those students who learn in spite of the system journey
successfully, but there are many who travel and finish in the dark. The
high points gained for the trip may enable these students to use their
accomplishment to take another trip but then find they themselves ill
equipped to journey alone. What are the figures on the drop out rate of first
year University?
Attempts in recent years to create ‘pathways’ through the senior years of
schooling and into tertiary education have been a big step forward in
enabling more powerful learning. But we have a long way to go develop a
mind set and a curriculum that value a meaningful ‘journey’ over a ‘trip in
the dark’.
The model of schooling that saw primary education as focussing on helping
students learn to read, write, do arithmetic and become good citizens and
secondary education as providing a preparatory pathway for a University
education was developed at the end of the last century.
At that time, most of the available jobs were in unskilled or semiskilled
labour. Australia was still largely living in the Agricultural Era with a rising
Industrial sector. At the turn of the new century, the new millennium, we
are living in the emerging Knowledge Era. Work requiring unskilled
labour is disappearing, work that was once considered to be semi-skilled is
now highly skilled in terms of design, materials and technology use, team
work and range of skills required. All human work has a much higher
knowledge component, is at a much higher level of intellectual skill and
learning skill.
The new reality for learning is that all students have a right and need to
become effective learners. The attitudes that have been developed by
teachers, students and society over the past century have no place in a
model of education designed for the Knowledge Era.
Increasingly throughout the twentieth century education has also been
perceived to have a role as an instrument for implementing social policy. If
a nation was lagging behind in technological progress, then more teachers
were lured into teaching science and technology and science and technology
was given a greater emphasis in the curriculum (as, for example, in the USA
during the sputnik era).
If drugs are a problem in society then drug education should be taught in
schools; if bike accidents are on the increase then bike safety should be
taught in schools. More and more has been added to the school curriculum
until it is bulging at the seams.
Around Australia cries to deal with the overloaded curriculum are
commonly heard. The danger is that we will attempt to respond to this cry
by mere pruning rather than with the fundamental reconceptualising which
is actually required.
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Julia Atkin
In order to reconceptualise a curriculum for the Knowledge Era – in order to
define what it is powerful to know – we need to be clear about our agreed
purpose, we need to develop a common sense of purpose, and we need to be
imaginative and deliberate about both the design of our curriculum and the
educational practices that will match our purpose.
Defining Educative Purpose - individual professional perspective
As an educator what is your educative purpose? Why do you teach? Not
why do you teach Design and Technology nor why do you teach Maths but
why do you teach young people at all? Why educate? Is your purpose
simply to serve the economic or political system? Does your fundamental
educative purpose transcend the particular context in which we are
educating? What are your core values and beliefs as an educator?
In a previous paper (Atkin, 1996) I outlined a number of processes and
activities which I use to engage individuals and groups in clarifying and
articulating their values and beliefs about education. One of the processes
involves people in selecting five values from a list of around forty values to
represent their core values – to represent the values they hold concerning
their educative purpose. It is not an easy task, for although many of our
actions may be intuitively value driven, most people are not used to
articulating their values. In initial discussions it is rare to get a group
agreeing on the same five values but within and across different groups of
educators the twelve values which have emerged most frequently are :
• self worth/self actualisation • growth
• knowledge/insight • confidence/competence
• responsibility • integration/wholeness
• creativity • rights/respect
• trust • equity
• achievement/success • adaptability
Many other values are seen to be important values re the means of
achieving the educative purpose. For example, people value “care” as a
means of achieving the more fundamental purpose of “growth”. They do
not educate in order to create a caring environment – rather they see that
creating a caring environment enables individuals to grow. They educate
to enable an individual to grow creatively.
Writing in The Nurture of the Human Spirit, (Oats, 1990) Bill Oats states:
I take education to mean the sum of all the forces which nourish the growth o f
the individual self. Much of what passes for education is better described a s
training. A child is trained to count, to spell, to read, to use a typewriter or a
computer. Education, however, is concerned more with awakening t h e
individual’s response, so that each wants to learn and so that each knows
what he or she wants to do with skills of reading and computing.
Education has suffered from the assumption that its meaning is derived from
the Latin verb, educere (to lead out), whereas in fact the root Latin verb wa s
educare, to nourish.
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Bill Oats (Oats, 1990, p 4)
When I reflect on the values most frequently identified by educators as
fundamental to their educative purpose and on Bill Oats’ writing on the

meaning of education, it is small wonder to me that educators feel such
tension between their own sense of educative purpose and the
maneuvering of education for political and economic purposes. What they
are experiencing is the tension between an emphasis on training versus
education. And it is a tension between a political driving force focused on
outcomes that that are perceived to serve the economic system and the
educative driving force which is focused on developing the understandings,
skills and attributes which make us more fully human.
Every time we, as educators allow the political pressures on our work to
have the dominant influence on what we do in schools we are selling out
on our fundamental educative purpose.
Defining Educative Purpose - a National perspective
In April 1999, the State, Territory and Commonwealth Ministers of
Education met as the 10th Ministerial Council on Education, Employment,
Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) and finalised the Adelaide
Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century.
The Adelaide Declaration outlines three broad goals, with identified sub-goals,
9
for Australian Schooling:
1. Schooling should develop fully the talents and capacities of all
students.
2. In terms of curriculum, students should have attained high
standards of knowledge, skills and understanding through a
comprehensive and balanced curriculum.
3. Schooling should be socially just.
If this is what MCEETYA publicly states as its educative purpose where is the
clash of values with the individual professional’s purpose?
On first reading it seems that these goals are generally congruent with the
values espoused by teachers. Why the tension? The problem lies not so
much in the clash of educative purpose (at least not a clash in stated
purpose) but rather an inadequate set of practices to achieve what is valued
and to value what is achieved.
Take a few of the sub-goals to “develop fully the talents and capacities of all
students” as stated in the National Goals for Schooling.
Examples of sub-goals
1.1 Have the capacity for and skills in analysis and problem solving and t h e
ability to communicate ideas and information, to plan and organise
activities and to collaborate with others.
1.2 Have qualities of self-confidence, optimism, high self-esteem, and a
commitment to personal excellence as a basis for their potential life role
as family, community and workforce members.
1.7 Have an understanding of , and concern for stewardship of the natural
environment, and the knowledge and skills to contribute to ecologically
sustainable development.
Adelaide Declaration on the National Goals of Schooling, April, 1999
(emphases added)

Julia Atkin
Then consider the recent ‘rushes of blood to the head’ about benchmarking
and standards and the fact that the final years of schooling are still straight
jacketed by being used to service the filtering and selection of students for
tertiary courses. You do not have to look far to see that, no matter what is
espoused in the National Goals, what’s made important by current practice
at the system level, is what can be measured in formal, mostly text based
assessments. And, heavens forbid, as the fervor to develop online
assessment escalates, we seem to be on the verge of reducing human
learning to the bits of information that can be processed by a machine.
As Eva Cox points out:
Success in education has mostly been publicly interpreted as the ability o f
child or school to achieve high scores in formal assessments. Educators h a v e
often challenged this view, talking about wider definitions of success
including self-esteem and skills. What I want to canvass today is the ways
sociability skills and transferable trust may lead to increasing social capital
and therefore more successful citizens in more civil societies. Where t h e
structures and processes of educational institutions to actively involve
stakeholders in learning the forms of trust which allows them to grow t h e i r
capabilities and experience positive capacities to collaborate with others for
the common good, they will create success for all. Eva Cox (Cox, 1999)
When anyone expresses dismay at the current emphasis on benchmarking
that uses only quantitative data, at the expense of more qualitative analysis,
the immediate reaction by proponents of benchmarking and standards is
that educators must be held accountable for outcomes achieved by students.
They tend to interpret any challenge to the benchmarking and standards
agenda to mean that educators do not want to be held accountable for their
work. While that may be so with a few educator, it is not the case with the
majority.
The majority of educators have no problem with being held accountable. As
educators we have an enormous responsibility to the students we educate.
In fact we want to be held accountable, but we want to be held accountable,
in appropriate ways, for achieving what we say we value:
• We want to be held accountable for helping to develop the self
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worth of students;
• We want to be held accountable for developing students’ sense
of ‘stewardship of the natural environment’;
• We want to he held accountable for helping students develop
the capacity ‘to collaborate’;
• We want to be held accountable to contribute to the
development of the full range of talents and capacities of
students.
Much as I would love to see Australia with the best educational outcomes
possible, I have some concern about the validity of the assessment
techniques currently used to make those judgements. So what if, as
measured by limited means, we are among the top nations in Science or
Literacy if we are also among the top nations in suicide rate!
Educators want to be held accountable for the full range of outcomes they
hold as valuable. And they want the education systems to be held

accountable for helping them achieve what they say —and the system says
— is valued.
Where are the attempts at a State or National level to help schools profile
and describe student outcomes against the full set of National Goals? It is
not good enough to say some things we value are not tangible, or not
measurable. We have to be smarter than that. Our challenge is to develop
assessment practices that measure what we value.
Pilot and trial programs
There are many schools around Australia who have taken it on themselves
to ensure that generic skills and attributes are more explicitly embedded in
the curriculum, and through explicit teaching, assessment and reporting,
they are given status to match that accorded to more “academic learning”.
These initiatives in developing autonomous learners (learning to learn and
learning to think) have not been stimulated by system initiatives. They
have generally emerged from strong internal educational leadership which
was frustrated by the piecemeal and narrow system imposed agenda which
they perceived had lost connection with the breadth of their educative
purpose.
These schools have felt the need to clarify and articulate their values and
beliefs, to state their mission — their educative purpose — and then put
time and energy behind their commitment to develop educational practices
that help them achieve what they value.
There are other interesting pilot programs and projects under way around
Australia exploring some of the possibilities. For example, the National
Industry Education Forum (NIEF) is working with the Commonwealth
Department, States and Territories on a manual to help teachers with
explicit teaching, assessment and reporting of the (Mayer) Key Competencies
(Redman and McLeish, 1999). Many people still seem to regard these worthy
attempts as an add on rather than an integral feature of a curriculum for the
Knowledge Era.
Defining Educative Purpose - a global perspective
In 1996, after three years of work, The International Commission on
Education for the Twenty-first Century presented its Report entitled
Learning: The Treasure Within (also referred to as the Delors Report) to
UNESCO. The Commission states:
. . . education is at the heart of both personal and community development; its
mission is to enable each of us, without exception, to develop all our talents t o
the full and to realize our creative potential, including responsibility for our
own lives and achievement of personal aims.
Jacques Delors (Delors, 1996, p 17)
The Commission identified four pillars for education throughout life:
• Learning to know . . .
. . . by combining a sufficiently broad general knowledge with the
opportunity to work in depth on a small number of subjects. This also
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Julia Atkin
means learning to learn, so as to benefit from the opportunities
education provides throughout life.
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• Learning to do . . .
. . . in order to acquire not only an occupational skill, but also, more
broadly, the competence to deal with many situations and work in
teams. It also means learning to do in the context of young peoples’
various social and work experiences which may be informal, as a result
of the local or national context, or formal, involving courses,
alternating study and work.
• Learning to live together . . .
. . . by developing an understanding of other people and an
appreciation of interdependence — carrying out joint projects and
learning to manage conflicts — in a spirit of respect for the values of
pluralism, mutual understanding and peace.
• Learning to be . . .
. . . so as to better develop one’s personality and be able to act with ever
greater autonomy, judgement and personal responsibility. In that
connection, education must not disregard any aspect of a person’s
potential: memory, reasoning, aesthetic sense, physical capacities and
communication skills
The Delors Report is a powerful and timely document to encourage
collaboration on reviewing and shaping education globally.
As I draw together here in this paper a glimpse of the values held by
individual educators, the Adelaide Declaration on the National Goals of
Schooling and the purpose of education, as articulated by the International
Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century, I cannot help but
be struck by the degree of congruence between them as ‘motherhood’
(parenthood ?!) statements. At least in formally stated ways there is
congruence between our values and educative purpose for the individual,
the nation and the globe. The problems still lie in the inadequacy and
inappropriateness of our practices to match our purpose.
To return to Bill Connell’s commentary for a moment…
Ambitious aims have been frustrated by imperfect instruments. Frequently,
worthwhile reforms have been proposed only to founder because teachers were
inadequately prepared to put them into practice or the public were not ready
to accept them. Inspiration has faltered in the face of inescapable routine.
Bill Connell (Connell, 1980 p 6)
Reconceptualising the Curriculum – WHAT is it powerful for learners to
know? What learning will equip learners for lifelong learning?
WHAT we think students should learn, the curriculum, is shaped not only
by our mission – our educative purpose, but also by the particular context.
What is the nature of the context in which we are educating at the end of
the twentieth century?
Peter Ellyard (Ellyard, 1998) talks in terms of a Planetist future in which
. . . transformed and growing individuals and communities can position
themselves for success in a world of rapid change, and they can create and

market the ways and ware both to create and benefit from the development o f
a Planetist future. The key to success is, therefore, learning. If our society i s
one which maximises learning with every step into the future, the chance o f
future success will be greatly enhanced. Thus the development of a new
culture of learning is necessary for success in the twenty-first century.
Peter Ellyard (Ellyard, 1998, p 59 )
As knowledge, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing become the key
assets in a knowledge based economy, as advances in information and
communications technology enable efficient storage of information and
rapid access to abundant information and, as advances in technology are
continually changing the nature of human work, lifelong learning becomes
the key to individual and collective economic prosperity.
The emerging learning culture contains a number of elements:
• lifelong learning
• learner driven learning
• customised learning
• collaborative learning
• contextual learning
• learning to learn
• transformative learning
• just in time learning
As I observe the endeavours of schools around Australia who are engaged
in thoughtful and imaginative review of their values & beliefs, their
mission and how to develop their practice to achieve what they say they
value and believe, there is considerable evidence to support the
development and emergence of the first seven of the eight elements listed
above. What seems to remain a stumbling block is the last element – ‘just
in time’ learning or a ‘just in time’ curriculum.
What does the term ‘just in time’ learning mean and is it an appropriate
concept for the school years of learning? The term is borrowed from the
manufacturing and retail sectors. Recognising that stockpiling large
quantities of raw materials and components meant that capital sat idle,
enterprises developed ways of operating which obtained what was needed
‘just in time’ for production.
As educators we know that the most powerful learning, the most powerful
teaching happens at the point of need. Yet much of the secondary school
curriculum could still be described as ‘just in case’. Much of what is learned
in a particular subject in the later years of secondary school is learned ‘just in
case’ students go on to further study in the subject at University.
What seems to dictate what is learned is not what learning will help us
achieve our core values; it is not what learning is foundational to enable
lifelong learning; it is not even what learning will equip students for
independent learning at a tertiary level but rather, it is what learning will
gain the highest marks on externally devised assessment tasks. The ripple
effect is felt from Year 12 well down into the early middle school years.
Due to the use of externally devised curriculum and assessment which are
used to determine who does or doesn’t get access to limited tertiary places,
13

Julia Atkin
many teachers and students seem fixated on what has to be ‘covered’ rather
that what has to be discovered or uncovered. Student learning becomes
‘functional’ rather than ‘transformative’ and the ‘does it count mentality’
takes hold; teachers’ purpose becomes focussed on the short-term
responsibility of helping students jump through the required hoops
successfully. It is the rare and highly skilled teacher who is able to engender
deep meaningful learning in a climate focussed on achieving on externally
devised, predominantly written assessment tasks.
Transformative learning and powerful pedagogy
Before looking at the deadly impact of the ‘does it count mentality’ on the
quality of students’ learning, how can we be more specific about the nature
of learning that we value? What do we value about HOW students learn?
Humans can learn in a variety of ways. We can learn like parrots, playing
back like a tape recorder what we have heard. Humans can learn like robots
- a 'monkey see - monkey do' type of learning carrying out actions without
thought, or we can assume attitudes and beliefs without questioning them.
Human learning has the capacity to be far richer than this. We can learn in
a way that transforms; in a way which endows our experience with
meaning; in a way which empowers us to perceive differently, to value and
appreciate differently; to adapt and to create.
I find a model of John Holt’s (Holt, 1971,p20) very useful for framing and
thinking about the sort of learning, the sort of knowing I value as an
educator not a circus ringmaster. He develops a wonderful little two page
cameo in a chapter of his book What am I Doing Monday? . The Chapter is
titled The Worlds I Live In. John Holt describes his perception of the worlds
we all live in. He says that each of us has four such worlds. The first world
is the world inside our skin. The second world is the world the individual
knows about from direct experience. The third world is the world the
individual knows about, but has not experienced in any direct way through
the senses. The fourth world is the infinite world of possibilities which the
individual has not as yet heard of or even envisaged - Figure 3.
World One is the world inside my skin, World Two is what I might call "My
World", the world I have been in and know, the worlds of my mental model.
This world is made up of places, peoples, experiences, events, what I believe, what
I expect. While I live, this worlds is part of me, always with me. When I die it
will disappear, cease to exist. There will never be another quite like it. I can try
to write or talk about it, or express it or part of it in art or music or in other
ways. But other people can get from me only what I can express about my
world. I cannot share that world directly with anyone.
Worlds Three is something different. . . . It is the world I know of, or know
something about, but do not know, have not seen or experienced. It has in it all
the places I have heard about, but not been to; all the people I have heard about ,
but not known; all the things I know men have done, and that I might do, but
have not done. It is the world of the possible. World Four is made up of all those
things or possibilities that I have not heard of or even imagined.
14
John Holt (Holt: 1971:20)

World 4
World 3
World 2
World 1
The world
inside my
body
The world I know
directly
The world I have
heard about
The world of possibilities,
the world I haven't heard about
Figure 3 The worlds we live in
Learning is an activity involving the dynamic interaction and growth of all
of these worlds. Let me bring the model alive through story. Fourteen
years ago, in the world I knew about (World three) but had not experienced
directly was parenting. thirteen years ago I had my first child and the world I
knew directly began to grow out to take in parenting. I can assure you as I
experienced it directly it changed my inner world forever–both emotionally
and physically! As I experienced it directly I wanted to know more about
parenting and what other people knew about parenting and so I read and
listened to others’ views and knowing about parenting.
In the past thirteen years of being a parent I have also selected to engage in
experiences which bring some of my ‘know about world’ into direct
experience. I ‘knew about’ wind surfing but had never experienced it. A
love of sailing, an inner drive, meant that when an opportunity arose I
chose to experience it directly. And as I experienced it directly I quickly
recognised the need to know more about it and what other people knew
about it as I couldn’t get the windsurfer back to shore!
Invariably as I experience things directly the impact on my inner world is
strong. Natural human learning is a dynamic and integrated interplay of the
worlds we live in–Figure 4.
Learning in this fashion tends to integrate our ways of knowing, gradually
and naturally our worlds form a coherent whole (see Figure 4).
15
Inner
Know directly
Know about
World of possibilities
Inner
Know directly
Know about
Inner
Know directly
Know about
Figure 4 The natural process of learning – transformative learning

Julia Atkin
What of learning in formal learning settings?
For some learners learning in a formal setting mirrors what happens for
them in informal learning settings - these learners are in the minority. For
other learners, learning with some teachers mirrors learning in informal
settings. However, for most learners, learning in formal settings rarely
mirrors learning in informal settings. For most students learning in formal
settings involves the filling up of the world we ‘know about’, but don't
‘know’; the world other people ‘know about’ but we do not know– Figure 5.
16
Inner
Know directly
Know about
Inner
Know directly
Know about
Inner
Know directly
JKnow about
Figure 5 Formal learning as learning to ‘know about’ and know about what others ‘know’
These learners know about World War II but don't know its connection to
their own experience of conflict; they know about levers and machines but
don't connect it to their own experience of lifting loaded wheelbarrows; they
know about Pythagoras' theorem but don't know how to use it to square a
building. They know what they need to know to regurgitate on exams.
They work to pass and not to know, alas they pass and do not know!
BertrandRussell
The focus on 'knowing about' but not ‘knowing’ has its roots back in the rise
of scientific thought when subjective ways of knowing were discounted and
discredited and rational modes of thought were reified. It has taken
centuries, and the realisations emerging from quantum physics, for western
thinkers to reassess our view of what it means ‘to know’. In his paper
Science and the Search for Meaning, Darryl Reanney captures the way
quantum mechanics challenged the positivist stance.
The insight stripped of its complexities is this, that the act of
observation changes the nature of the thing observed, that the observer
and the observed far from being separate are coupled in the most
intimate of ways.
Darryl Reanney
And thus we have dared recognise that our reality is constructed internally
and that our reality is shaped by the software we bring to bear on the data we
receive.
I, and many others, have a strong belief that powerful human learning
involves constructing and reconstructing our own meaning in the world.
However this does not mean that an individual’s learning should be

limited by the bounds of the world they experience directly. The open
discovery approaches of the seventies were misguided in the sense that they
did not recognise that the challenge for educators is to help individuals
construct, for themselves, the understandings that other minds have
discovered before them. Left to chance, or open discovery, my belief is that
you would have to be Einstein, or Einstein-like, to discover what he
discovered. In words written a long time ago. . .
The task of the teacher is not to put knowledge where it does not exist,
but rather to lead the mind’s eye so that it might see for itself.
17
Plato
In some schools, the swing away from a heavy emphasis on ‘knowing
about’, and ‘knowing what others know about’, resulted in many students
going through school without knowing vital facts–eg maths tables facts.
You are limited and constrained in mathematical thinking and problem
solving if you have to work it out, look it up, or use a calculator every time
you want to process something like seven fours. The challenge for
educators is to discern what facts, what procedures, what skills need be
automated to ensure that further learning and thinking is not impeded.
The learning secret is to ensure that those facts are only automated after
deep understanding is in place.
Transformative learning versus functional learning or ‘hoop jumping’
I have asked many thousands of people over the five to ten years what
factors are operating when they learn with deep meaning versus simply
knowing about and knowing what others know about. The list below came
from a group of business people and is typical of the factors that others
mention.
Factors which promote meaningful, transformative learning:
• intrinsic motivation
- learner purpose not teacher purpose
- relevance/interest
- challenge
- curiosity
• direct expereince
- practical application
- vicarious experience; simulation; role play
• crisis/catastrophe
• sharing, having to teach someone else, dialogue
• teacher.mentor passion
• strategies which connect at the point of personal experience
• strategies which stimulate emotions
• strategies which connect with, or challenge, inner belief systems

Julia Atkin
Let me expand on what I see as the impact of the ‘does it count mentality’ on
the nature and quality of human learning. In Figure 6 I have drawn out two
intersecting dimensions for motivation and I have mapped out the nature
of learning which emerges as a result.
The impact of aspects of motivation on the nature of learning
high personal desire – high intrinsic worth
deep
personal
meaning
Teaching as. . .
EDUCATING
low need high need
functional
learning
low personal desire – low intrinsic worth
Teaching as. . .
TRAINING
Figure 6 The impact of aspects of motivation on the nature of learning
In the vertical dimension I have drawn out the continuum for motivation
from low personal desire – low intrinsic worth to high personal desire –
high intrinsic worth and in the horizontal dimension the continuum from
low need to high need.
When what is being learned is motivated from within, or when it is
perceived to have high intrinsic worth, and there is a felt need to learn, the
learning which occurs will have deep personal meaning and the learner is
transformed. When learning is motivated externally, when it is perceived
to have little intrinsic or personal worth, but there is a high felt need to
learn, the learning that occurs tends towards purely functional learning. It
does not hold deep personal meaning and it does not transform the learner.
Usually when whatever created the felt need for the learning is removed
the learning is quickly forgotten. It served the purpose for the time being.
Teaching as educating aspires to create learning experiences that transform.
Teaching as training is satisfied when, like dogs in a circus, the learners can
jump through hoops.
Many senior students select subjects, not because of their intrinsic worth nor
personal desire to learn but rather because it is the particular ‘hoop’
designated by the selection system as being of the most worth. Getting high
marks in the subject gets them where they want to go and hence the ‘does it
count mentality’. It is an indication of the weakness of our current
assessment techniques that students perceive that high marks can be
obtained by having the right information rather than deep understanding.
18
low
engagement
Adapted from discussions with participants in the ‘Principles of Effective Learning & Teaching Workshop’
Apple Innovative Technology Schools Conference, Wollongong,1998

It is no surprise that our greatest advancements in developing educational
practices that are congruent with what we say we value have happened, and
are creeping up from the early childhood years, through the primary years
and are now influencing the middle years of schooling. Having recognised
the low degree of engagement of many learners in the middle school years
and the consequent alienation from schooling we are at last attempting to
rectify this with a strong middle years of schooling movement that has
articulated principles of effective learning and is actively supporting the
enactment of these principles in congruent educational practices.
Ten years ago it may have been possible to claim that the lack of meaningful
learning in schools was due to an inadequate pedagogy. Although there are
no doubt still some teachers who lack an adequate pedagogy my sense is
that a pedagogy quite capable of developing meaningful learning for all has
been developed by the combined efforts of many educators and educational
researchers over the past twenty years. What stops a lot of teachers
embracing this pedagogy is their fear that it will enable students to ‘hoop
jump’ so well. Teachers are under enormous pressure from society and the
system to develop good ‘hoop jumpers’. Until we can bring equal pressure
to bear to achieve all the outcomes we say we value the powerful pedagogy
developed in recent years will struggle to blossom.
The task of freeing the senior years from the narrow purpose of acting as a
filtering and sorting device remains our biggest challenge.
Learning to know - learning to learn?
As mentioned earlier there are many schools around Australia and further
afield who have or developed, or are developing learning to learn
programs. One such school is Tanjung Bara International School in East
Kalimantan. If its location takes you by surprise it’s actually a school for
children of expatriate families and it is run by the Tasmanian Department of
Education. Over a number of years the staff at Tanjung Bara have
developed a vision for Learning for Life – Learning to Learn. They have
articulated what they believe are the attributes of an autonomous learner
and how these attributes would be demonstrated. They have then
developed a cross-curricular, developmental model for implementation. At
this point their documentation is in preparation for publication but let me
help you into some of their thinking.
Think about a person that you would describe as an autonomous learner.
What are their attributes? What skills do they have?
Now see how your list of attributes and skills compares with the work of the
staff at Tanjung Bara.
19

Julia Atkin
An
Autonomous
Learner
has a
combined with and has developed
o f
affective
attributes
which are expressed
expressed in
which are expressed
i n
such as
such as
operation
using
such as
such as
are able to
such as
in
reflective &
purposeful
approach
positive
outlook
and can be which is
and is
resources
physical,
personal
technical,
temporal
cooperation &
collaboration
communication
evaluation
purposeful
questioning
takes initiative
reflective
open minded
reliable
self motivated
organised
takes risks
Figure 7 Characteristics of an autonomous learner
o f
metacognition
involving selection
appropriate
strategies
for
for
skills &
strategies
decision
making
organisation &
planning
active
learning
The staff have then taken each aspect of their description of the
characteristics of an autonomous learner and asked:
• what learning experiences will lead to the development of these
and use of
for
problem
solving
attributes; how can we design learning experiences to ensure that we
develop these attributes rather than simply leave them to chance?
• how do we integrate and embed the development of these attributes
and skills across the curriculum?
for
creative
expression
• how will students demonstrate each of these attributes? What are our
20
intended outcomes?
• how will we monitor and report on the development of these
attributes and skills?
for
There is much similar work going on in schools around Australia and there
are some glimmers of hope that some State systems might get behind such
initiatives and help support school based development of these learning to
learn endeavours. The operative words here are “support school based
development”. The power of the work done by the Tanjung Bara staff and
the staff of other schools in Australia is that the teachers have done the
thinking. It is not perceived to be imposed practice, the professional
learning has not been ‘functional’. The professional learning has been
transformative. Their documented endeavours can be a reference point but
the real power will be in engaging your own staff in thinking out the
concepts and practices themselves.
relations
with others
sense of
self worth
adapt
learning
style
memory
thinking
© Tanjung Bara International School, 1996
enthusiastic
curious
balanced & broad
interests
love of learning
positive orientation
tolerant
supportive
independent &
interdependent

Learning to know – the challenges
In summing up. . .
• make your values and educuative purpose explicit
• develop the means to measure what we value not simply value what
21
we can measure
What is your knowing? the way you integrate the input
of experience to make sense of your world.
Darryl Reanney
• look with new eyes
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Julia Atkin
References:
Atkin, J.A. (1996) From Values and Beliefs about Learning to Principles
and Practice Seminar Series No.54, Melbourne:IARTV
Beare, H. & Slaughter, R. (1993) Education for the Twenty-First Century
London: Routledge
Benjamin, H. (1939) The Saber-Tooth Curriculum New York:McGraw Hill
Connell, W.F. (1980) A History of Education in the Twentieth Centruy
World Canberra: Curriculum Development Centre
Cox, E. (1999) Success for All Paper presented to Curriculum
Corporation National Conference, Adelaide, May 1999
Cross, J. (1975) Schooling the Conflict of Belief Sydney: Ashton
22
Scholastic
Delors, J. (1996) Learning: The Treasure Within Report to UNESCO of
the Internatioanl Commission on Education for the
Twenty-first Century
Ellyard, P. (1998) Ideas for the New Millennium Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press
Ellyard, P. (1999) Learning for Thrival in a Planetist 21st Century Paper
presented to the Annual Conference NSW Secondary
School Principals’ Council, Wollongong
Middleton, M. (1981) Marking Time Metheun
Oats, W.N. (1990) The Nurture of the Human Spirit Hobart: The Friends’
School
Oats, W.N. (1995) Values Education Hobart: The Friends School
Redman, K. and McLeish, A. (1999) Final Report on the Regional
Development through School Industry Partnership
Project. In press, NIEF, Melbourne.
Russell, B. (1926) On Education Unwin, London
Stringer, W. (1998) Middle Schooling in a P-12 Context Seminar Series
No.79, Melbourne: IARTV
Townsend, T. (1999)The Third Millennium School: Towards a Quality
Education for All Students Seminar Series No. 81,
Melbourne: IARTV

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