The Quality of 3L - a Cultural Point of View

1er Forum mondial EFTLV, Paris, novembre 2008

THE QUALITY OF 3L - A CULTURAL POINT OF VIEW -

Serban IOSIFESCU

Chairman - Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre-University Education

Motto

The sole certainty is that tomorrow will surprise us all

Alvin Toffler

The first foundation for this need of change is the speed and the capriciousness of the social development. The future is less and less predictable but more and more unstable: individual and organizational initiatives are more and more likely to have global impact. In this respect, it is legitimate to ask which competencies – academic and professional – do we target in our education and training systems to be relevant for jobs and occupations inexistent so far and for a fluid and a volatile labor market?

The second premise is the exponential growth of the information we have access to: today the amount of information double every month and, in several years, in certain knowledge areas, this doubling-up of information will happen in days. What kind on knowledge should we select and use in schools, in order to be relevant in five years from now, in a society we don’t know how it will look like?

The third and, I believe, the most important assertion is the rising awareness of the differences among cultures and the growing tensions between cultural specificity and globalization. What kind of values, mindsets and attitudes do we reinforce in our education and training systems to cope with both “cultural localization” and “global access” to jobs, knowledge and leisure?

In this context it is obvious that the only thing we can predict about the future of education and training systems is a life long, and life wide perspective: it will be mandatory to learn all along our lives and from all contexts and life situations.

1. The new meaning of quality: the “Future Quality” concept in education

The first answer at these questions mentioned above should be in terms of the usefulness of the learning outcomes (defined in terms of “competencies” – i.e. functional systems of knowledge, skills and attitudes), for specific learners, in a changing and unpredictable society. Therefore, we need to define a “good and useful” school, a “good and useful” education. Bearing in mind the common definitions of “quality”, that means we need, explicitly, a new concept of “quality” in education and training.

The international discussion around concepts, methodologies and instruments related to quality assurance in the field of education and training is rather new but more and more complex. On the measure the experience acquired in companies was transferred in the educational area and on the measure the stakeholders, the direct and indirect beneficiaries of education, took part at this discussion, it became obvious that the education received in school and a lot of competencies acquired by in service (formal) training programs were poor: the information was obsolete, the skills were inadequate to the new technologies and, above all, some very important attitudes (openness to change, flexibility of mind, respect for diversity) were not considered and targeted.

In this context, the providers of education and training realized that it is not enough to have a “first-class” curriculum, qualified and satisfied teachers, expensive textbooks and upgraded computers in order to provide a “good education”, based on the learners’, employers’ and other stakeholders’ needs and interests. Not even the “stakeholders’ satisfaction” and the “public accountability” of the education and training providers to the community do not guarantee the usefulness of the knowledge, skills and competencies (acquired in education and training), in a society we don’t know how it will look like.

“Therefore, education relevance to the future is one of the critical elements in the discussion of education quality. It means that in addition of internal quality and interface quality, we should have education quality for the future in terms of education relevance. We may define future education quality as the relevance of education to the future needs of individuals and the community to meet the coming challenges in the new millennium. Therefore, future quality assurance refers to the efforts to ensure the relevance of aims, content, practices, and outcomes of education to the future of new generations in a new era” (CHENG, Y. C. , 2001, p. 17).

That means that, besides the classical quality indicators (dealing with “context”, “input”, “process” and “output”), we need to think thoroughly how to measure quality in terms of future relevance for individuals, communities and at global level. We don’t know how this “future” will be. So, what do we know?

• We know that people will have to learn all their lives. There are dozens of qualifications and occupations nor even dreamed ten years ago and, in ten years from now, there will be, maybe, hundreds of qualification we don’t even imagine. Thus, the learners will have to be able to learn, not only in terms of knowledge and skills, but in terms of attitudes and willingness: the education institutions will need to persuade the learners to be keen on learning. In this respect, the ability to learn and the attitude to learning and self development and, consequently, the capacity of the education and training provider to offer self-rewarding and enjoyable learning opportunities could be very powerful quality indicators (See also MAEHR, M., MIDGLEY, C., 1996 and IOSIFESCU, S., 2007).

• We know people are different, and we become aware of those differences as the measure we have global access to information and knowledge. So, the key of quality become differentiate, even individual education. The quality may be revealed, in this respect, by the capacity of the education and training provider to respond, in a flexible way, to individual needs.

• We know that individuals need to be autonomous. So the quality may be measured by the capacity of the education to empower individuals and communities with knowledge, skills and attitudes for reflection, analysis, critical thinking and ethical behaviour, in order to make their own, sound and context relevant decisions.

• We know that technology is more and more important for us and, therefore, that we become more and more dependent of it. On the other hand, we know that we move off from our natural environment – with all well known consequences. So, the proper use of technology (not only ICT, but all other new technologies such biotechnologies, as well) should be a must for everyone. Thus, the ability to access and use adequate technologies, bearing in mind not only the immediate benefits but also the long term effects may be a relevant quality indicator.

2. A new approach for schooling: “knowledge management” for all

In the last decade new management areas became important, besides the traditional ones (curriculum, finances, facilities, human resources etc.). More and more we are talking about quality management, about environment management and, above all, about knowledge management. The reason is clear and agreed by all stakeholders: the knowledge becomes the most valuable asset of an organization – especially for education and training institutions which are supposed not only to share, to transmit knowledge, but to create it. One of the main issues in this respect is how to manage all the knowledge and the learning processes in order to take the maximum benefits from the technology and human resources. In this context, the organizational survival and excellence are depending on the capacity to learn, where every individual, group or department is supposed to share this learning culture.

The first approach of this issue was technological: more and powerful computers, broadband internet connection, updated software and huge databases. But the last decade studies demonstrated, for instance, that is no relationship between computer expenditure and company performance: more than 1 trillion USD were invested in USA in the last 20 years in technology but there is little progress in efficiency and effectiveness of the use of knowledge by the personnel involved. The cause may be the organizations’ ignorance of ways in which knowledge workers communicate and operate through the social processes of collaborating, sharing knowledge and building on each other’s ideas. These facts already demolish some myths (HILDEBRAND, C., 1999):

• Myth 1: KM technologies deliver the right information to the right person in the right time. This allegation cannot be sustained because it’s impossible to build a system that predicts what the “right” information is, who the “right” person is at what the “right” time may possibly be.

• Myth 2: Information technologies can store human intelligence and experience. The databases applications store data, but they cannot store the mechanisms that only people possess to make sense of these data. Moreover, information is context-sensitive. The same assemblage of data may need different responses from different people, in different situations.

• Myth 3: Information technologies can distribute human intelligence. The information in a database does not guarantee that people will see or use this information, and do not account for renewal of existing knowledge and creation of new knowledge.

The conclusion is that the sole introduction of new technologies in education and training is not enough. We need people able to use this technology, to make the most benefit of it. This is, in fact, knowledge management: organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings. Thus, the “knowledge worker” has to be able to communicate and operate through the social processes of collaborating, sharing knowledge and building on each other’s ideas. Quality schooling has to provide learning opportunities in this respect.

3. New models for change: the educational reform as cultural change

The studies and analysis dealing with this issue (see, for instance MAEHR, M., MIDGLEY C., 1996, CAVALLO, C., 2004) confirms that many of the traditional approaches to the educational reform (enforcing and enhancing standards, upgrading school staff, reorganizing and decentralizing, changing the curriculum, increasing funding etc.) failed and the crisis continue. It is obvious that culture affects not only the functioning of any organization, but also the way a specific organization changes, develops and improves. The unchanged and unchanging culture is often the cause of inefficient and non-productive investments in school and only with a supportive culture for a specific planned change, that change may possibly be successful:

• The introduction of “critical literacy” programs will fail wherever the teacher is not able or not willing to think critically.

• A teacher reluctant to his/her own professional development will not be able to develop a positive attitude for (life long and life wide) learning.

• The use of the new technologies will be ineffective wherever the main evaluation criterion is the number of students per computer.

• The development of reflective and autonomous minds will be not possible with teachers unwilling to accept different opinions coming from their students.

I can add dozens of other examples but I think I made my point clear: all reform processes have to deal with the individual and collective human mind and the educational reform has to be seen in terms of cultural change. Without considering what changes require a specific reform in terms of mentalities, values, norms and mindsets, the reform will be “absorbed” into the existing culture and the change will be, in the best case, at rhetoric level: we shall only say we’ve changed something, but our practice and behaviour shall remain the same.

In Romania we experienced such a case: the Romanian pupils’ results at math and sciences did not change within the last eight years, even if a dramatic and comprehensive curricular reform (as considered by all stakeholders) occurred since 1999. A curricular reform is supposed to change something: the results could be better or worse. But such a result – nothing changed – indicate that this reform did not reach the real, day to day, teaching practices: many teachers considered that a new curricular framework may be applied with old habits and assumptions.

This issue becomes more critical, in a wider context, whenever we talk about the common “European values”. We assume that if we use the same words, we mean the same things. A relatively recent study (“The Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe”, 2004) argues this assumption: “economic integration simply does not, of itself, lead to political integration because markets cannot produce a politically resilient solidarity” (“The Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe”, 2004. p. 6). And even more:

“A mere list of common European values is not enough to serve as the basis of European unity, even if the charter of basic rights included in the Union’s constitutional treaty points in this direction. This is so because every attempt to codify "European values" is inevitably confronted by a variety of diverging national, regional, ethnic, sectarian, and social understandings. This diversity of interpretation cannot be eliminated by a constitutional treaty, even if backed up by legislation and judicial interpretation” (“The Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe”, 2004, p. 8)

We had seen, recently, the “awful truth” of these ideas when the Constitutional Treaty failed to be adopted, setting back the European political union with at least one decade.

What to do in this context? Haw can a new concept of education (and, especially on “good education”) smoothen this process? My belief is that one possible answer could be the focus on learning: all economical, political, national and inter-national processes (and even drawbacks) may be (and should be) considered as learning opportunities for individuals, groups and nations: