21st Century Schools

Dynamic

Better that we model our passion to know something thoroughly than to merely transmit content or knowledge.

Curious: A rigorous curiosity underpins the most fruitful work scholars do.

attentive and alive, responsive

Derivative

a resolution to the inquiry

a series of iterative experiments.

Cormier suggests rhizomatic education — constructing and negotiating community knowledge through a series of interdependent nodes — as a pedagogical solution within quickly changing fields of information. In other words, by connecting to each other, no matter our expertise or station, knowledge grows.

We may provide the content, but this is no different today than scattering LEGOs on a table: what happens next is not up to us

from a traditional model of schooling to one more compatible with the realities of the digital landscape. Experimentation, inquiry, and play are both the research tools we must use to create online and hybrid classrooms, and also the methodologies best employed within those classrooms.

Testing and canonical content are less vital to the new media landscape than interactivity, play, and relevant application.

that students “show up,” be curious, collaborate, and contribute.

The digital has reminded us that learning happens unexpectedly, and so should our approach to learning be unexpectant. We must return play to education, to pedagogy, and to all scholarly practice.

Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: This book was produced by graduate students in a course with Cathy N. Davidson. The text of the work is itself rigorous, but what we find most intensely rigorous is the way the reader is brought into the book’s ongoing creation through simultaneous publishing on communal platforms like Rap Genius, HASTAC, GitHub, and Google Docs.