This Learning Module analyzes three pedagogical paradigms which we call "didactic", "authentic" and "transformative". It traces the ideas outlined in New Learning, by Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope.

Understanding these educational traditions matters as they are woven into everyday classroom practices. Many classrooms use a variety of these approaches. Educators should know the power of each, its historical and cultural purposes, when to deploy it, how it works when it does, and when it fails learners and society.

Essential Readings

• New Learning: Introduction
• Chapter 1. New Learning
• Chapter 2. Life in Schools
• Chapter 8. Pedagogy and Curriculum
• Chapter 9. Learning Communities at Work

Post-Covid Thoughts

• After the COVID-19 Crisis: Why Higher Education May (and Perhaps Should) Never be the Same
• Schools after COVID-19: Seven Steps Towards a Learning Revolution

Video Mini-Lectures

Supporting Material

• Peters on the Knowledge Economy
• Political Leaders, Speaking of Education [Nelson Mandela, The First President of Post-Apartheid South Africa]
• Political Leaders, Speaking of Education [Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese Opposition Leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate]
• Political Leaders, Speaking of Education [Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate]
• Political Leaders, Speaking of Education [Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan]

Comment: Find a contemporary text of political rhetoric or public policy that sets social objectives for education (a video, a quote from a written text etc.). Comment on the substance (or lack thereof!) in this text.

Essential Reading and Comment​

​New Learning Textbook (available online)

• ​New Learning: Introduction
• New Learning Chapter 1. New Learning
• New Learning Chapter 2. Life in Schools
• New Learning Chapter 8. Pedagogy and Curriculum
• New Learning Chapter 9. Learning Communities at Work

Other Publications by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

Following are some (mostly recent or upcoming) scholarly publications by Cope and Kalantzis related to this course. We'd like you to read some of them to get a broader sense of our thinking. Please join the New Learning community in CGScholar for updates as we publish new work!

• On Cyber-Social Learning: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence in Education
• Generative AI: Implications and Applications for Education
• Platformed Learning: Reshaping Education in the Era of Learning Management Systems
• Multiliteracies: A Short Update
• Towards Education Justice: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Revisited
• Education 2.0: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Test
• ‘Education is the New Philosophy' - to Make a Metadisciplinary Claim for the Learning Sciences
• A Metalanguage for Learning: Rebalancing the Cognitive with the Socio-Material
• The Changing Dynamics of Online Education: Five Theses on the Future of Learning
• Futures for Education Research
• Learner Differences in Theory and Practice
• The Things You Do To Know: An Introduction to the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
• The Digital Learner: Towards a Reflexive Pedagogy
• Assessment and Pedagogy in the Era of Machine-Mediated Learning

Mkae a Comment: Read two of these recent publications. What are the main takeaways? Or things that surprise you? Or things you agree or disagree with. Please select articles you have not read or reviewed in another course.

Video Mini-Lectures

Supporting Material

• No Future Left Behind
• McMahon on the Economics of Education
• Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
• Kalantzis and Cope, New Tools for Learning: Working with Disruptive Change
• A Vision of K-12 Students Today
• James Gee, Video Games are Good for Your Soul
• The Fun They Had
• Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap
• Kalantzis and Cope: A Charter for Change in Education

Make a Comment: Mention a stand-out idea, or new thought prompted by this material. How have you experienced recent changes in the nature of education, either as a student, or a teacher, or both? Give an example. And/or speak autobiographically.

Didactic pedagogy is relatively old, with roots as old as writing. However, it came to near-universal prominence as a mode of learning in the mass, institutionalized education that emerged almost everywhere in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The experience of didactic education is still common today, for a variety of social, cultural and, at times, practical reasons. Mass, institutionalized education allows parents to work while schools take care of children, imparting the basics of reading and writing. Perhaps more importantly, however, didactic teaching inculcates in children a sense of discipline and order. It has teachers and textbooks telling, learners absorbing what they are told, and when it comes to the test, students getting their lessons right or wrong. In the didactic classroom, the teacher establishes a pattern of relationships in which students learn to accept received facts and moral truths, comply with commands issued by the teacher and absorb the authoritative knowledge presented in the curriculum. In these classroom settings, students learn to get used to a balance of agency in which they are relatively powerless to make knowledge themselves or to act autonomously.

Video Mini-Lectures

Supporting Material

• Winston Churchill’s School Days
• Yan Pho Lee’s School Days
• George Orwell’s School Days
• Maintaining Classroom Discipline
• Charles Darwin’s School Days
• Charles Dickens Introduces Mr. Gradgrind
• Audre Lorde’s School Days
• Mahatma Gandhi’s School Days
• 13 Times 7 is 28

Make a Comment: Parse an example of didactic pedagogy today that connects with the ideas in this update. When is it appropriate? When is it anachronistic?

Authentic pedagogy movements emerged in the 20th century, in part as a reaction to the culture of order and control characteristic of didactic education. The major principles of authentic education are that learners should take a more active part in their learning, and that this learning should be closely and practically connected to their life experiences. Authentic education is more child-centred, focusing on internalized understanding rather than formal repetition of the ‘right’ answers. But does it necessarily have the effect of changing a child’s life chances? Or is it at times overly ‘practical’, accepting that unequal life chances are inevitable? Authentic education’s critics argue that, all too often, it does not fulfil the promise of education.

Video Mini-Lectures

Supporting Material

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Emile’s Education
• Maria Montessori on ‘Free, Natural’ Education
• John Dewey on Progressive Education
• Early Progressive Education
• A.S. Neill’s Summerhill
• Rabindranath Tagore’s School at Shantiniketan
• Kohn on Progressive Education
• A Critique of Progressive Education

Make a Comment: Describe and analyze the features of an example of authentic pedagogy today.

Transformative pedagogy focuses on the learner and learning. As such, it sets out deliberately to transform students’ life chances and play an active role in changing social conditions. It changes the balance of agency in learning relationships by encouraging learners to build their own knowledge in a supportive learning environment, to work with others in lateral knowledge-making relationships (peers, parents and community members), to negotiate local and global differences, and to extend the breadth and scope of their education beyond the walls of the traditional classroom.

Video Mini-Lectures

Supporting Material

• Bill Gates on American Schools
• Kalantzis and Cope, A Learning Journey
• Transformative Education Case Studies
• The MET: No Classes, No Grades and 94% Graduation Rate
• Class Work
• Children Learning on their Own
• Discovery 1, Christchurch
• Ivan Illich on ‘Deschooling’
• Ken Robinson on How Schools Kill Creativity
• I Did It All By Myself
• Paulo Freire on Education that Liberates
• Classrooms of the Heart

Make a Comment: Describe and analyze an educational innovation. In what senses might it be called "transformative"?

Chapter 8 of our New Learning book explores pedagogy and curriculum - the processes of mimesis in didactic pedagogy, processes of synthesis in authentic pedagogy, and reflexivity in transformative pedagogy. Following are some source materials addressing these ideas.

Mimesis: The Modern Past

• Aristotle on Mimesis
• St Benedict on the Teacher and the Taught
• Inside Pakistan’s Madrasas
• Thayer, Learning about Bark
• Confucius on Becoming a Learned Person
• A Morning at the Dong-feng Kindergarten
• Why Should They Look Behind Them?
• Michael Apple on Ideology in Curriculum
• A Japanese Cram School

Synthesis: More Recent Times

• Froebel on Play as a Primary Way of Learning for Young Children
• Thayer on Making Curriculum Relevant
• Lisa Delpit on Power and Pedagogy
• Bruner’s Theory of Instruction
• Moves You Make You Haven’t Given Names To

Reflexivity: New Learning

• Reflexive Learning Case Studies
• Kress on Meaning and Agency
• Vygotsky on the Zone of Proximal Development
• Reggio Emilia on Educational Principles
• Cazden on Pedagogical Weaving
• ‘Learning by Design’ Knowledge Processes
• Planning Strategically … Pooling Our Pedagogies
• Learning by Design in the Lanyon Cluster
• He Didn’t Know What He Didn’t Know
• You Need to Think About It!
• Coaxing Learners to Think for Themselves

Make a Comment: Describe and analyze the dynamics of learning in a curriculum practice that reflects "mimesis," "synthesis," "reflexivity," or a combination of these.

Does technology-mediated learning necessarily change things? In what respects can it be said that technology in general is pedagogically neutral? On the other hand, in what respects do particular technology applications reflect particular pedagogical approaches or values?

Make a Comment: Parse an e-learning technology or practice. To what extent and in what ways does it reflect Didactic/Mimetic, Authentic/Synthetic, or Transformative/Reflexive Pedagogy?

This course includes a peer-reviewed project as a part of the course requirements. This project must be fully completed for course credit.

To see details of this project and the peer review rubric, refer to the Learning Design and Leadership Course Framework Learning Module from the CGScholar Bookstore. Refer to your course community and the course syllabus for specific requirements and timelines.