Cultivating Curriculum Conversations

I’m sure I don’t have to say how Zoom and other online meetings have lost their novelty. I remember after the first lockdown had happened to me in my home city of Melbourne (at that time the world’s most liveable city) how relieved I was that I could still stay in touch with my creative team… you know, just seeing their friendly faces and cheering them on as we mutually faced the shock of not physically working together. But now, I’m over it… I know in every part of me how much harder it is to explain complex ideas online without the advantage of seeing the whole body thing and reading the interactions between the team. Tens of thousands of years of human evolution, shaping our humanity as the storytelling animal and the pandemic hits at the very essense of our nature.

But what about the inability to share conversations about learning itself? Have we stopped to think about how important talking to each other about what, why and how we learn is a huge blow on that other primal aspect of our humanity… we’re homo sapiens… the mammal which is endowed with the ability to learn about learning. Our consciousness grants that special state in which we can tell ourselves and others about our growth of understanding, our acquitions of skills and our burgeoning insights from lived experiences.

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself.

John Dewey

Here are some suggested questions to start you talking… 

THE WELCOME – How do you welcome and engage students, staff or clients into our course?

THE WHAT – What are you doing to ensure that the learning experience is memorable?

THE WHY – Is inspiration even possible without questions raised and energetically followed up?

THE HOW – How are dialogue and conversations part of the learning experiences?

WHAT’S NEXT – Handling so what? What are you doing to build a sense of ongoing progress?

Pellentesque quis nisl non dui pretium ultricies a at nisl. Vestibulum mattis aliquam metus a maximus. Cras maximus feugiat mauris at vestibulum.

Phasellus sodales ultricies facilisis. Vestibulum finibus felis odio, ac tincidunt ex porttitor sed. Vivamus et viverra purus. Vestibulum sed odio mauris. Sed sed feugiat felis. Duis dapibus sollicitudin neque, ac lobortis lorem hendrerit id.

Sed at ante ut augue gravida efficitur ac sit amet nibh. Donec enim felis, ornare sit amet dignissim a, finibus iaculis risus. Morbi luctus, odio eget mollis semper, ante urna dictum nisi, a porta magna leo id tortor. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nam in odio faucibus, varius lorem sit amet, ultricies massa. Nam lobortis enim a enim viverra maximus. Aenean ullamcorper quis mi et euismod. Fusce auctor sem in lectus fringilla lacinia.