Educational Approaches

• What different approaches to education exist?
• What are the similarities and differences between the education systems in different countries?
• What can we learn that should inform schome from comparing what works and what does not work across different approaches in different countries?

These key questions underpin ongoing work on exploring alternative educational approaches, education systems in different countries and the work of prominent educational thinkers. Our initial analysis has focussed on the development of a typology of 'education programmes' (Rix & Twining 2007) to help us in comparing and contrasting different educational approaches.

Aspire Pilot

The Aspire Pilot was a NESTA funded project that supported young adults in developing visions of schome (the education system for the Information Age). Specifically, the Aspire Pilot set out to:

• develop a community of people who were interested in the future of education, and particularly in building a vision for schome.
• work with young adults to develop 'provocations' to support other young adults in thinking creatively about what schome should be like (i.e. in developing visions of schome). 'Provocations' might be activities/techniques/approaches that support vision building.
• develop the technical infrastructure to support collaboration within the community of people who are working with us on developing visions of schome.

The Schome Park Programme

The Schome Park Programme (SPP) was set up in response to the difficulties that people had within the Aspire Pilot and in a range of focus groups in coming up with 'unconstrained' visions of schome - all the visions folk came up with were 'like school only better'. This is perhaps hardly surprising in a context in which school and university are such dominant models of education. Kieron Sheehy suggested that we use Second Life virtual world to give people a 'lived experience' of radically different forms of education. So that is what we set out to do - starting in late 2006.

The Schome Park Programme has been through three phases, each of which had a different focus. You can download a copy of the Phase 1 report (The Schome Community 2007) or explore the wiki to find out more ...

References

Rix, J. & Twining, P. (2007) Exploring education systems: Towards a typology for future learning?, Educational Research, Vol 49, No 4, pp.329-341.

The Schome Community (2007) The schome-NAGTY Teen Second Life Pilot Final Report: a summary of key findings and lessons learnt, http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=9851 (viewed 20-July-2007).