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We all know that good, free and equal education for all is under pressure, for many reasons. Technological developments make it possible to produce huge amounts of data, which in education is used as a superficial measure for the quality and results of the education system. These datasets have fostered a reductionist view of education in political circles, in the press and in parts of the public where education is expected to produce results in numerical form. Reducing the results of education to numbers on a scale has also opened possibilities for competition and, therefore, also for commercialization of all parts of the education system. All of this contributes to rob the teaching profession of its core mission, which is to make professional judgements about how teaching and learning should be done with the unique children and pupils teachers are responsible for.
How can we defend the core values in education and of the profession? First of all, we must protect and uphold the core ethical values of the profession, which is to give the highest priority to the interests of the learners. We must give the children and the pupils an even better learning experience by strengthening their inner motivation by reducing the value of test results, by giving the pupils a variety of learning situations and a feeling of learning together with a whole learning community.
We must work to change the general top-down culture that characterizes the whole education system from the minister to children in early learning and pupils in the classroom.
This will be an enormous task in the next few years, one for which we must take responsibility together, as a professional community, nationally and internationally. We can succeed only if we work together because there are enormous opponents, especially “Big Money.” We can succeed in this fight only if we learn from each other. If we cooperate with the pupils, the parents and the local communities, we can find the strength to avoid the distractions of the culture of testing and rankings. This is one of the lessons we have learned from our three-year partnership with Alberta and Ontario schools (NORCAN) as we connect schools in an effort to foster equity in subjects such as mathematics.
We need new ideas, and we need to analyze our practices from the outside. One way of doing this is through collaboration networks. National and international networks of students, teachers and school leaders have proven to be strong drivers for a change of culture in and around educational institutions. Such projects generate ideas, experiments, new roles, new relations and they give the participants new positions from which they can evaluate their own practice and their need for new knowledge and competence. It gives parents and the local communities the chance to actively take part in the work. And we can use the new technology actively to reach our goals, both as instruments for learning and as instruments for communication.
The teaching profession must set itself in the driver’s seat of this cultural struggle for the soul of education that is quickly coming our way. Our organizations, both the ATA in Alberta and the Union of Education Norway (UEN), are the only representative organizations for the teaching profession in our jurisdictions. Therefore, it is up to us to lead the work. We need to build strong international partnerships. But we also need to build a strong coalition with the students and their parents and the local communities. We need to help our students develop a strong voice, both in relation to what is happening in the classroom, but also to give them a voice in the political debate about the future of our education system. This cultural struggle is really about what kind of community we would like our children to grow up in.
Roar Grøttvik is a political advisor to the elected leadership of the Union of Education Norway, the dominant teacher union in Norway. He is a member and representative of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD, and a member of the NORCAN partnership between schools in Norway, Alberta and Ontario.
