Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

Superdiversity!!

"United Colors of Benetton" made exclusive and extremely controversial marketing a couple of decades ago..

Challenge 7

How can we transform cultural diversity into valuable resources at home?

Every student is a unique individual, but diversity can be a hindrance to education if a teacher does not know how to teach in a classroom of cultural diversity. On the other hand, diversity can be an amazing asset to education. Schools and teachers need to create a positive learning environment and learning community that is open, and the encourages collaboration, cooperation, and critical thinking. In the classroom, it is important to provide students with equal opportunities, and with chances to work together and step outside of the framework of their own mindset in order to understand their fellow classmates.

Cooperative Learning is a more specific type of collaborative learning where students are assigned to work in small groups. In those groups, they are graded on both an individual and group level. CL encourages teamwork, and makes each student value the other members in the group. It creates an environment where the group’s success is based on their ability to work together and help each other succeed. CL is important when dealing with a diverse student body because it teaches the students to appreciate each other and their different diversity orientations. It allows students to interact on a more personal level with other students who they may not have talked to before. This allows the students to share their diversity and different backgrounds with each other, creating a more comfortable learning environment.


James Banks designed a method to multicultural education that includes collaboration, cooperation, and critical thinking. Banks limits his method to multi-cultural education, however it can easily be expanded to include all sorts of different diversity orientations. The five dimensions that he lists are content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and empowering school culture. Content integration simply means using a wide variety of content from different places. Teachers should teach about different geographic regions, genders, SES levels, and learning styles as well. Knowledge construction is a type of critical thinking similar to role-playing that encourages students to think about the way that knowledge is created and influenced by people of certain diversity orientations, and how it might be different coming from a different perspective. Prejudice reduction is encouraging positive relationships among students of different diversity orientations, and can be achieved through the cooperative learning methods discussed in previous sections. Equity pedagogy is the acknowledgement that students from different backgrounds may learn in different ways. Teachers need to be aware of this in order to write lessons that maximize every student’s success. Empowering School Culture means that the school creates equal opportunities for success for all students, regardless of diversity orientation. This is similar to creating a positive learning community. Banks’ model lays out a good framework for a few specific methods of creating a classroom and school environment where all students can learn, regardless of their diversity orientation. There are a large number of differences between students that lead to a diverse student body and Banks identifies nine main differences between students: Race, gender, socio-economic status, nationality, ethnic group, abilities and disabilities, religion, and geographic region. The total sum of all of the differences that make up each individual and unique student will be referred to as the student's diversity orientation. A teacher must take into account the student's entire diversity orientation when devising a lesson plan in order to maximize each student's education.

"The Colors of Friendship", a poster on cultural diversity and multiculturalism

Challenge 5

What is cultural identity and cultural hybridity? And how are these concepts important for professional pedagogical work?

Training students to become aware of hybridity in near surroundings, one get’s overwhelmed by the mixing of origins of use, idea and development of products. It would be simpler to point out artefacts that weren’t hybrids. The hybrid artefacts are the products of mixed origins. Interiour, exterior, electronic devices, teaching materials. Many things were originally designed in the developed part of the world, often as a hybrid of an old and a new idea, ideally becoming a more functional matter in it’s new form. The production of globalized products are often produced in less developed countries,  solely for economic reasons.

I chose to write a presentation of myself as an alternative to a cv signalling global competence with reference to “The Global 3000 Questionnaire”: "Greetings from Copenhagen, Denmark. My name is Ane Loeve. I was born in Denmark by danish parents. I have 2 sons of 10 and 19 years of age and my age is 42. I work as a substitute teacher in secondary school and study to become a teacher at night. I will complete my education in the summer of 2012. My income varies from one month to the other, because my working hours vary. I look forward to having more of a steady income; Teachers’ wages in Denmark are absolutely solid. The income for a new teacher working full time is around 3000,- € before taxes, and aound 2000,- € after taxes, depending on ones allowance.

Globalization is not only a topic of current interest. In globalization lies all the questions and answers of our future life on the planet.

Personally I tend to worry about my childrens future and my own future as well. No one knows what tomorrow will bring. But it makes me happy to know, that the world is filled with opportunities and new mysteries to be solved.

My favorite food is the food that makes me feel good. I try as much new food as I can. I like trying the new.  I spend a lot of time in my kitchen developing new recepies experimenting with ingredients; the wellknown and the unknown.

In future I expect to travel abroad to work as a teacher in a local project. I want to go to the U.S., my language skills will see me through many problems. But I would also like to work in Spain and Southamerica. But I need to learn spanish first, which is the first course I’ll attend to, when I’ve a teacher".

Human zoos were popular attractions less than a hundred years ago..

Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World by Arturo Escobar

The entire book free of use on the internet! Hail globalization 3.0!

Challenge 6

What is the third world, and why are some countries developing while others claim to be developed?

Conditions of globalization has changed  through history. From Globalization 1.0 starting with the official discovery of The Americas in 1492, lasting till 1800’s where Globalization 2.0 showed itself to be an integration of economies through international trading, which along the entrance of new millenium, has been renewed by Globalization 3.0 as the beginning of a new era. The era of communication. At this point; The world is flat, according to  Thomas Friedman, the author of ”The World Is Flat”, 2005.

Our teacher, Johnny, said  that a new discovery is always absolutely positive. Why? Because that is the main view in a dominant discourse of development! Because as Johnny also pointed out: Who has the right to claim being the discoverer? Who knows and who cares, who discovered () first? All our personal patterns of thinking, can be seen as an average of the discourses we live in. Up to this day and age, the western dominating discourse on race, education, violence and wealth had influenced the construction of todays discourse. Positive, that the discourse had built in a belief in development..! Or we would be stuck in time and space. What is logical, may not be true and what is true, may not be logical.. 

We're made aware that the voice and control can sound from other than predominant parts of the world: the western world power and the industrialized world. Many third world countries recovered from collapse and famin. The same countries may now be viewed as fully competitive. Globalization and development is therefore available  in a broader perspective that includes more cultures than the European ruling class mentality, which until the present has been the dominant discourse in relation to development. What is globalization all about? Up to now it has been about economic growth and economic assimilation. Countries (and individuals) requires an increasing empowerment simultaneously with a global homogenization of the strong exponential growth. Globalization is about to become public property, is about to become the air we breathe. We can manage global development from the couch. But that doesn't promise healthy developments for the future? On a large scale it would require that we  learn how to succeed in a forum with new rules. The global space-fora. We will have the equipment to shape the world as global citizens, but the w.w.w. is neutral as is power in relation to the theories of Focault. one could expect more acton on social and environmental conditions.  if the agenda is set by people, but still about who has power and how that power is maintained. by the help of setting people up to their ears in debt. Debt is a vicious spiral, a forceful economic powertool system, which has followed us since the first copyholder. 

What are the prospects for democratic empowerment of the individual citizen of the world? Will there still be major gaps between rich and poor? Is it only the belligerent nations, NATO and the UN, which ultimately sets the agenda and as yet not doing it because governments brakes for a reasonable development for the common good? Are we living in discourses less violent than in the years of The French Revolution, or is our strtegic outlook just different? What has reslly changed about the way we treat each other on a whole? In Denmark it is an offense to hit children, to use violence as a mean of bringing up children. But it is still considered being a hero to participate in wars. That is only logical, because of the intermediate accounts we know to be 'true'.