Title: Education innovation in the slums
TED: Ideas worth spreading: TEDSalon London 2010
By: Charles Leadbeater
April 2010
Key Points: Charles Leadbeater discusses the need for radical thinking in the school system. Radical Thinking? Yes, I know change is hard. People often fear the term radical because with it comes an extreme view which is often contradictory to what we believe now. Leadbeater talks about the need to pull students into learning as opposed to pushing them into education. Researching in the slums of South America and Africa, he addresses the need to engage people first before you educate them. The need to show them how education will be relevant to them in the here and now as opposed to the future. He states we need to look at learning through questions and problems, rather than knowledge and curriculum.
Intended Audience: Educators, administrators, government officials, politicians and anyone who is willing to take a radical approach to education.
Relevance: Charles Leadbeater did his research in the slums of developing countries, however, many of the ideas he discussed can be brought to the low socioeconomic neighborhoods of our own country. The need to pull our students into education by engaging them with relevant information which can better their lives in the present instead of some distant future they cannot even conceptualize.
I like what this article is saying because I have similar thoughts on how students should be taught. Relevance and building relationships are two important things I believe will help create an effective classroom. In the slums and other poor areas relevance is even more important so that we give the students more reason to come to school instead of wandering the slums and streets.
ReplyDelete