This week I readLankshear and Knobel (2011) Ch7: Social Learning, âPushâ and âPull,â and Building Platforms for Collaborative Learning. Itexplored in depth of social learning, âpushâ and âpullâ paradigms, and building platform for social learning. I feel most related with two themes in this chapter: First the "push" and "pull" paradigm shift. Second, the relationship between "passion" and "persistence" as two success factors in learning.
"Brown and Adler (2008: 30) conclude their discussion of social learning by arguing that this potential coincides with the need for a new approach to learning that increasingly moves from the familiar âpushâ or âsupplyâ model toward a âdemandâ or âpullâ approach. They claim that a demand-pull approach to learning âshifts the focusâ from pushing pre-determined curriculum content contained in learning programs to âenabling participation in flows of action where the focus is both on âlearning to beâ through âenculturation into a practiceâ and on collateral or consequential, âspin offâ, by-product learningâ (ibid.)."
It seems that Brown and Adler label a distinct difference on these two approaches. I also saw some of my peers are having the same thoughts that "push= bad, pull= good" from Hypothesis annotation. I found at the same time interesting and intriguing the shifting paradigm from push practices to pull practices. I tend to be cautious to extremely different approaches where the benefit of the new focus are exalted over previous learning theories. I have personal hesitations toward shifting totally away from the previous planning approach (or push model as the authors mentioned). I believe in the importance of large-scale planing and programming development.
I said that because my experience in my recent years teaching. The school I am working now does not have a unified curriculum for world language learning. We didn’t use textbooks either.TPR Storytellingis a big thing in our world language department. While it is a great method to introduce new vocabulary and drill sentence structures to students. It also brought problems: there are gaps, sometimes big ones, between classes in the same level, because every class created their own vocabulary list and learned different structures based. The gaps have made it difficult for students to merge when they go to the next level, especially in higher levels. From last year, our school made some adjustments. Each language team sit together and created a general frame for the next year’s curriculum. We created "required" and "flexible" list of vocabulary and structures to ensure our students are moving forward with some consistency.
Rather than confronting both approaches in mutual excluding practices, I think it would be more beneficial to learn in practice how to identify which components of both are key to support building collective knowledge, innovation, and productiveness, which are in my understanding the ultimate goal of world language learning.
In short, masterypresupposes âpersistenceâ. Persistence, in turn, requires passion otherwise people give upâ (Lankshear and Knobel, 2011, p. 224)
The authors summaries the relationship between "persistence" and "passion".
What can be the real implications for education? How can we help students to identify their passion? How to encourage persistence in the current world language learning where the tend is evolve and change constantly?
In everday Chinese classroom, we spent lots of time drilling on speaking, listening, reading and writing. It is challenging for students to maintain the same interest level as the semester starts. It is easy to forget the initial reason that why they signed for the world language class. We, as their teachers, need to create an enviroment is fostering their passion and promote the spirit of persistence.
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