Last week, I signed off, after promising that I would introduce you to the elephant in the room, which is the task of building a sensible curriculum for future sensible living in the country.
On Monday 14 September, I was at a talk delivered by Ms. Irmeli Halinen, who is the Head of the National Curriculum Reform from the Finnish National Board of Education. I had lunch sitting next to her and talked to her about Meghshala. (She loved the idea.) With her was Pirjo Koivala, also from the National Board, Counsellor of Educational Support in Finnish classrooms.
How do these magical things happen?
Anyway, hot off the press are these words of wisdom from Irmeli regarding the reform process. The most important point to remember is that Finland went in for system level curricular reform … <SYSTEM LEVEL.> The reworked curriculum becomes operational in 2016. The curriculum is holistic and has been through all the educational acts and decrees. These acts drive government decrees, which in turn drive the construction of the core curriculum and all local curriculum. This then directs teaching and studying. At the very top of this heap is LEARNING in classrooms. All the connections in this garland of reforms are two-way, so information is truly shared up and down this line.
“So why did the curriculum change, when the standing curriculum was the envy of the world?” I asked. She smiled. “The children did not feel the joy of learning,” she said quietly. I looked at her incredulously. She nodded.
The Finnish curriculum designers asked these questions: “How is the world changing?” “What is worth learning in this changing scenario?” ”What does good learning look like?” “What future do we want to build?”
And then, heart-stoppingly, “In 2036, what is the story that they will tell about what we did for education in 2016?”
The answer should be, she said, “The education focused on making people connected, they taught us to love and care for each other, they made us ready to help one another and build the future together, all of us. We are human, are we not?”
I was practically salivating. HERE is a country and HERE is an education system. And nary a mention of quadratic equations!
The team spiraled the process of curriculum construction by public sharing, feedback, an edit cycle and finally fresh construction. This produced a new curriculum that was focused on the changing scenario of the world today and was titled so: The Changing World, The Changing Role of Students, The Changing Concepts of Learning and Competencies and finally, The Changing Role of Teachers.
The questions that kept rising out of these thoughts were, “How can the students have meaningful learning?” and much more importantly, “How can they meaningfully “be”?”
The thought that came home to me at the end of our conversation was that THIS is what we talk about in Meghshala all the time. This is what we want to do:
“How do we help children to meaningfully BE?”
-By, Jyoti Thyagarajan, Founder Trustee
Meghshala
This article was first published on meghshala.wordpress.com on Sep 15, 2015