by Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ and Director, CREDI
Congratulations to the CREDI students who graduated on Thursday, November14. One of our Board Members, Sr Angela Ann Zukowski, Dayton University, US, delivered an outstanding graduation address entitled: The Catholic Teacher in a Rapidly Developing Digital World. Her paper, as well as papers from speakers at CREDI’s excellent Symposium on November 16 at Capital Plaza, will be made available on CREDI’s website. She has given me permission to share a few extracts from her lengthy presentation:
“Graduation is a kairos moment! This is a moment to renew our commitment for becoming the best teachers, administrators and mentors for all persons who will cross the threshold of our lives…Each of you is an ‘artist’ and you are to create a masterpiece with your life!…Whether we are engaged with science, technology, engineering, math (STEM), art, religion, music, or literature – we are practicing our vocation as artists!…
Educators, and especially Catholic Educators, need to embrace the fact that our work is an ecclesial act – it is a work of the Church. Today it is a particularly bold work within a rapidly expanding digital culture, or civilisation. This digital culture is informing, forming and transforming our students, the digital natives, with quantum speed.
We stand on the threshold of a new educational missionary frontier. There is much for us to learn of how to navigate through the vast digital portals for designing effective ways for stimulating the imagination, particularly the religious imagination of our students… I strive to see the new digital milieu as a gift evoking a call and not a threat provoking fear!
This does not mean I am not aware of the dark side of the digital milieu, e.g. the rapid invasion of cybercrime, cyber bullying, cyber warriors, cybersex, crises of privacy vs. transparency, and the immediate impact on interpersonal day to day human relationships and family cohesion. I face these challenges head on believing firmly that education, particularly Catholic education, can and does offer a value added dimension in the face of a new digital civilisation…
We have slowly begun to realise that the industrial model of education is not working! A new way of being human has been let loose in the world! Marshall McLuhan was right! “We shape our technologies and our technologies shape us!” What does it mean to be human in a digital civilisation?
We may look around our learning environments and experience the vacuum of digital resources that are available…Educators must move forward together defining a vision and collaboratively working across and within the nation to ensure that a quality of excellence is woven into every level and space of the fabric of our educational system in the nation…young people are digital natives!…Learning for them is no longer contained within four walls but within new learning environments without borders, without walls…Our children have never been more ‘wired’, or, connected to the world, with or without educators in tow!
We are immersed in an education revolution across the board. We have to challenge what we have taken for granted and now have to think outside the box….In the 20thcentury, the approach to education was focused on learning-about and creating stocks of knowledge that students might deploy later in life. This approach worked well in a relatively stable and slow changing world where students could expect to use the same set of skills throughout their life. But now life-long learning is imperative – everything is in flux, constant change calling for flexibility, adaptability, just-in-time learning and out-of-the box thinking for creative alternative solutions to life, culture, religion, and spirituality, economic, political and social shifts…
Textbooks are becoming software programmes built to deliver a mix of text, videos and digital homework assignments. The ever growing repertoire of E-books is demonstrating libraries are no longer a physical place but are now in ‘the cloud’! Educational environments are rapidly becoming paperless with learning centres where iPads, Tablets, or the like are the essential educational tools…Technologies have loosened our sense of place and space in a digital age; therefore, creating a vast universe of e-learning communities of interest…
The notion of ‘just-in-time learning’ means that whenever you need to learn something in order to accomplish a task, you can find out what you need to know: through blogs, YouTube, Ted Talks, MOOCS, Websites, Google and more… Neuroscience study indicates that knowledge is actually organised differently now because of the Internet. Digital natives’ brains are being re-mapped in light of their intensive and continuous time spent with digital technologies…”
Read Sr Angela Ann’s article to find out how all this impacts our understanding of teaching and learning today. And she is correct, being an educator is a “holy vocation.”
