CREATIVE MEDIA CULTURES: LEARNING BEYOND THE SCHOOL
Julian Sefton-Green
Head of Media and Arts Education, Weekend Arts College
Julian:
What I want to do is take up some of the challenges that were posed in this morning's talk to an extent, and it does follow quite nicely from Jane's presentation in terms of looking at different kinds of learning. Basically what I'm going to do today in a slightly roundabout way as we go along, is to describe the place where I work, which was originally called the Weekend Arts College, I'll get this bit done with quickly because it's so painful. It was then known as WAC, but then we started doing work throughout the week and it became untenable to be known as the Weekend Arts College, so we changed our name to WAC Performing Arts and Media College, but then everybody spends the whole time asking you what WAC stands for, so that's my cross.
WAC is a very original and different kind of learning institution, and what I want to try and do in a way is describe how we work but also characterise it within the context of a broader understanding of what might be characterised as the non-formal learning sector. There are some peculiarities to WAC about why it could only exist where it exists and how it works and I'm not necessarily making a case but it's a model that could be mainstreamed, and I'm happy to take those kinds of questions. So the focus of this talk, Beyond the Blackboard, is around teaching in a way but, of course, we're really interested in learning, and teaching only comes into the equation, in a sense, inasmuch as it provides a context for learning. We know that teaching takes place in institutions and through experiences. We also know that it's incredibly socially situated; the key feature of most modern analysis, contemporary analysis, is that learning stresses the social context of learning.
On the other hand, we get terribly obsessed and interested in teaching because that's actually what we control. We can build and fund, monitor and regulate teaching institutions but actually learning is a bit ineffable and a bit beyond our control.
To begin with, I want to identify two concepts, and that's to distinguish between informal learning and the non-formal learning sector. I'm not saying I'm right about this, but by informal learning I mean the kind of learning that happens informally as you watch a television show, as you play a computer game, while you're at a museum, while you're out at a restaurant - the learning which is non-organised by a formal learning sector. And by the non-formal learning sector I mean organised forms of learning that take place beyond the school or statutory sector. Is that OK as a kind of working definition?
So informal learning as opposed to formal learning - formal learning being a kind of classic maths exercise or something like that. It's a false distinction right away but it needs to be made. It's a false distinction because you can have informal learning in formal situations, and you can have formal learning in informal situations. A good example of the latter is the work I did recently on chat rooms, where we looked at how kids instructed other children to learn how to behave in chat rooms, so there you've got an informal cultural setting but actually rather formal organised learning; if you listen to the way that the children were talking to each other, it was formally organised. I can give you more references about that if you're interested (www.wac.co.uk/sharedspaces).
On the whole, our learning institutions tend to fall into two categories; compulsory and voluntary. This morning's talk very much picked up the point that schools are themselves an amalgam of different sorts of motivations. We know they're so big and so complicated there's no point in pretending that they can do one thing simply. They're not just about teaching, they're not just about learning, they contain all sorts of aspirations. The history of schooling in this country is to do with the then Christian pastoral training and production of worthy and morally proper citizens, and then throughout the last century in particular there was an emphasis on schools as training for employment and industrialisation. |
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The other kind of learning institutions we're all familiar with, and I think they should all be considered in the same kind of orbit, are what I think of as the edutainment industries. Now, some of these are commercial and some of these aren't commercial so I've deliberately and provocatively put museums next to television there, for example. Edutainment, as you all know, is a bastardisation of entertainment and education, and these are the kind of institutions that our society spends a lot of money on managing, which creates formal learning occasions. I tend to think of museums as belonging to the formal learning sector, although they describe themselves as being in the non-formal learning sector, because they are organised and curricularised. A museum, on the whole, has a plan, it has pedagogy, it has a style, it has a relationship, it has a path, it has a progression and it presents knowledge in a certain kind of way.
I want to briefly talk, to put aside from the conversation, the concept of informal learning and edutainment on the kind of voluntary side of things, before I move on to describe WAC and how it works as both a formal and an informal learning centre in the non-formal learning sector.
We know there's a lot of interest in and a lot of studies of the ways in which the media and young people's interaction with the media are themselves a form of learning. I'm not going to talk about this now today but tomorrow my colleague, David Buckingham, is going to talk particularly about the long history of research into how children learn from television in that kind of way. There's a lot of interest at the moment in the production possibilities of digital technologies, the capabilities of young people to make wikis or blogs, web pages, home pages, video, music - there's a whole range of cultural production activities that young people can now make by themselves informally in the home. These are often organised, and what the digital technologies, these production capabilities, offer, is the possibility of a whole range of activities that previously could only take place in the formal education sector now taking place in domestic situations.
One good example about this debate and discussion around the educational potential of informal learning is computer games, which in a way stands as a case study for our times. Those of us that have played computer games and been interested in computer games have always made the case that they offer an intelligent and intellectual engagement with kinds of learning. Recently, computer games have been touted as a kind of solution for the problems of education, and last week there was a project reported in the newspaper, the headline was something like 'Games are Educational' - and I was talking to some colleagues here at lunchtime who were telling me about meetings with the DfES, a very high-powered interest in the ways in which computer games are suddenly discovered to be educational. Of course, for every discovery of the educational computer game, there's been the release of Grand Theft Auto where you get a moral panic about the non-educational nature of computer games and their morally degrading involvement. Very interesting sets of studies have come out recently, such as James Gee's work 'What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning', which show how a form of proscribed cultural activity, a cultural activity that we're all anxious about, that we're all worried about, an activity that clearly engages boys who are the kind of demon failures of a statutory education system - I'm exaggerating slightly - appears to offer an engagement. And there's been a huge attempt - you can see that at this conference, both explicitly and implicitly - to try and recuperate games,
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