what is the purpose of education?

What is the purpose of education?

Teachers must maintain curiosity; fundamental tasks of teachers are to set examples. Sometimes, communication is thought to be just verbal. However, it is also achieved with the body, the whole body, eyes, look, face; a certain air we may adopt, suggesting curiosity. It is important to be curious while teaching mainly for the engagement and interaction from the pupils. Why educate? What for? One reason is to develop the ability to ask good questions, and to refute false answers. There is no real humanistic education, no education for liberation. Teachers must not be afraid of asking questions, it is not necessary to give talks about asking. It is better to ask, give an example to the pupils of the pleasure and the need of questions.

Education for all and the quality of life – meaning that when we think of education for all, we immediately think of an education which is committed to the concerns of men and women in world. Attaining a better quality of life for those making history in the world, this never means to impose a concept of education for all. What should be ethically and politically imposed should be that education for all is really provided throughout the world, since it is a right. (Paulo Freire, p.3)

How to achieve education for all, is for the people of the world and not just the responsibility of the government. It will be hard to see a future without an equilibrium between riches and poverty. One of the problems is that the leadership of the Third World belongs to the First. We must include in the notion of development the question of the quality of life. This change is o immense importance for education.

The main purpose of education is to strengthen your mind so that you can more easily learn to deal with specific challenges you will face throughout your life. Even though you will forget most of what you learned in school, the intense effort you spent struggling with difficult academic material tones your mind, just like how physical conditioning tones your body. (Philip J. Guo, 2010)

The ULTIMATE purpose of education is to open the mind of students and prepare them to face the world. But unfortunately, students think education is getting a degree from a reputed university and landing a high paying job (Ayushi Kushwaha, law student. 2018) We shall always be crowned as people who are intelligent and fit to be a part of a processive society. We understand education to be a privilege card that exempts us from any responsibility towards the liberate or the less-educated ones. (Ayushi Kushwaha, law student. 2018)

From a personal view, education is seen more on the social class/working class side and can be taken advantage of very easily. This meaning, children who have education handed to them on a plate (started attending school from a young age) don’t realise how much of an impact education can have on the rest of their lives. However, there are children around the world who are unable to go to school because of their parent’s income, or housing, there are so many issues as to why children can be deprived of an education. These children are desperate for an education while others throw it away and don’t appreciate how fortunate they are. ‘education is the key to lifting families out of poverty’ (concern.org) each year someone spends in school accounts for a 10% increase in their potential earnings. Four years in primary school can boost a farmer’s productivity by nearly nine percent – education reduces poverty. Education reduces inequality, education is a key factor associated with men’s attitudes towards women. Men with less education – particularly those who have not completed secondary school, have more rigid attitudes and are more likely to be violent towards their family. (concern.org) This is all relevant and facts to how important education is to children and how education can also affect the whole family as well as the child.

Pedagogy is a really important role in education. Pedagogy is how someone teaches, the importance of a clear set of actions to help achieve goals. This meaning the dynamic relationship between learning, teaching and culture. Pedagogy interacts with and draws together beliefs about learners and learning, teacher and teaching and curriculum.

Pedagogic strategies refer to a general abstract teaching method. Some approaches/methods are;

·         Integrative Approach – make connections of learning across curricula; focuses on connections rather than isolated facts. It aims to connect what is learned in school to real life situations.

·         Integrative Teaching - thematic teaching, theme helps students see the meaningful connections across disciplines or learning areas.

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·         Reflective Approach – teachers analyse their own practice and underlying basis to consider alternative means for achieving their ends.

·         Collaborative Approach – collective learning, learning communities, peer teaching, peer learning or team learning. (think, pair, share)

·         Inquiry-based Approach – learners acquire knowledge by investigation. (role play, games, mode)

So why is education important? Education helps to bring productive results. Education is important as the population is increasing, needs of people are raising. Education brings importance to children as they are the future of our world and they should be updated with current affairs. Children are the weapons to build the nation with all their knowledge and education. Children will stand out as future leaders to develop the nation from all the issues, the hurdles stopping to grow. We should inculcate the past generation’s values and carry them with huge current innovations. It helps to break the social evils like racism and poverty line, so each child must be educated.

References

The Purpose of Education; Extract from “The 40^th Anniversary of the UNESCO Institute for Education. Freire, P. (1992)

The main purpose of education, available at http://pgbovine.net/purpose-of-education.htm (2010) (accessed on 28/04/19)

What is the ultimate purpose of education? Available at https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ultimate-purpose-of-education-Are-we-achieving-the-concept-of-education-1 (2018) (accessed on 28/04/19)

Why pedagogy matters, available at https://www.unesco.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/pedagogy.pdf (accessed on 28/04/19)

Pedagogical Approaches, available at https://www.slideshare.net/sherylpacheco37/pedagogical-approaches-78844794 (accessed on 28/04/19)

Why is education important? Available at https://www.concern.org.uk/about/our-programmes/education/why-education-important (accessed on 28/04/19)

Why is education important? By Chitra Reddy  Available at https://content.wisestep.com/education-important-top-reasons/ (accessed on 28/04/19)

How can storytelling be used in Primary Education?

How can storytelling be used in Primary Education?

Stories permeate everyday life – to explain, persuade, argue or entertain. These daily narratives often warn, encourage and pass on ideas of ‘what we do in our family’ or in our community. Narrative not only plays a part in social and cultural development, but also has an essential role in effective or emotional development, helping to organise feelings and make sense of experience. Narrative is central of learning. It occurs in anecdote, gossip and everyday conversation but even these forms pre-suppose a certain ordering and selection of experience of fulfil specific intentions. Telling anecdotes about any incident is not just a re-running of events like an unedited recording, it is necessarily selective. In these selections, experience is categorised: a cognitive operation which sets mental frameworks for more complex forms of categorising, selecting and generalising experience or facts – the basis for constructing more formal kinds of leaning. In their play and reading, young children use story to wonder about the world, to make hypotheses as they explore the possible worlds of ‘what if’ (Cremini et al.,2017). (Bearne and Reedy, Teaching Primary English, Routledge,2015)

Recent research into young children’s storytelling and story acting (Faulkner, 2017) shows how early years practitioners and children as young as 3 and 4 co-constructed stories through guided participation (Rogoff et al., 2003) which was accompanied by collective story-making between the children through play. As Vygotsky states: ‘Play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his  average age, above his daily behaviour; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 102)

Storytelling, story acting, imaginative play and drama are essential to secure early language and literacy development. However, Wohlwend and Peppler (2015) warn the play is losing out to the demands of standardised measures, particularly in early years class-rooms. Similarly, creativity is in danger of being squeezed out of the primary curriculum because of high-stakes testing (Moss, 2017). Since these activities are not only necessary to children and adults, it is important to foster story and imaginative play in all its forms.

(Campbell and Hlusek, 2015) have explored the role of storytelling performances in the classroom. This investigation was carried out to investigate the use of anecdotal storytelling as a means of augmenting writing (Campbell and Hlusek, 2009). Hlusek wanted her students to ‘preform’ storytelling telling as an art, which would help them appreciate storytelling and emphasize reading and storytelling for pleasure. The goal of this investigation was too ‘boost oral fluency along with achievement levels in reading fluency and comprehension.’ (Campbell and Hlusek, 2009).

Campbell and Hlusek’s (2009) investigation led them to believe that ‘activities built on storytelling and talk can provide practice in speaking and listening skills.’ this quote then become true as their research showed that whole-class storytelling project showed that 25% of Hlusek’s class needed to improve their oral language fluency along with reading fluency and comprehension. This targeted 4 certain children with special needs, which was then part of a schoolwide ‘school improvement plan’ targeting improved achievement in reading fluency and comprehension for lower achieving students.

Copies of Arnold Lobel’s (1983) one-page tables for the students to use for their own storytelling. Terry Campbell modelled how to tell a story orally and provided a series of steps (10 steps for storytellers) used when learning a story for ‘telling by heart’.

There are 10 steps for storytellers:

1 – choose a story you really like. Read several storied to find the right one.

2 – read the chosen story silently two or three times, picturing the story in your mind as you read.

3 – read the story aloud to your partner.

4 – visualize all the details of the story and discuss them with your partner.

5 – create a storyboard, using at least three cartoon boxes, to show the main events of the story with pictures and captions.

6 – tell the story to your partner using your storyboard. Don’t worry about using the exact words from the book.

7 – tell the story again without the storyboard. Visualize as you tell.

8 – reread the story to check for missing parts or special words you want to remember.

9 – PRACTICE! PRACTICE! PRACTICE!

10 – trust the story and yourself. Tell it to your circle.

(Adapted from Parr and Campbell, 2012)

Campbell and Hlusek (2015) concluded that activities within the classroom improved children’s reading fluency and oral fluency.Storytelling does not always involve books, there’s something called digital storytelling, and this is can be used to reinforce subject matter, to share and experience or present some new information in a creative and interesting way, which will be more interactive to children of a primary school age. Digital Storytelling can be used as homework, classroom work or group work projects. These tools can be used to help bring a story to life.

As part of a university practical involving storytelling, we’ve been involved in lectures where storytelling has been the main focus, we have created iMovies on apple products such as iPad and iPhones. This included me and my peers holding a variety of different style and shape books, Welsh books, kids books, adults books etc. We did this in our seminar times and was a very fun and interactive way to get us all apart of the storytelling experience and how it shapes people’s minds to be around books and how books have a big part in educational needs for children and young adults like myself.

Vygotsky: learning and teaching as essentially social activities
Vygotsky outlines a theory of learning and development. Key elements of Vygotsky's theory are;

• learners move through age related stages in which learning undergoes qualitative changes: thus, children may learn in different ways from adults, including their adult teachers.
• learning is an active meaning-making process in which the learning process itself needs to be understood and prioritised.
• it is important to distinguish what we might call 'meaningful' learning and concept development from 'rote' learning - described by Vygotsky as 'a parrot like repetition of words by the child, stimulating a knowledge of the corresponding concepts by actually covering up in a vacuum' (Vygotsky 1962, p. 83) Vygotsky believes that social activities help with children's learning strategies as mentioned above.

As part of our teaching course, the seminar groups have been involved in lots of activities related to storytelling, we have used our narrative in forest school to create woodland houses, we have gone to the library to read some children’s books which brought back so many memories from primary school. We also played in the sensory room which was very beneficial as there was many activities in place for storytelling such as puppets, books and visual cards.

References

Introduction to Education Studies; 3^rd edition. Bartlett and Burton (2012) Sage.

Storytelling for Fluency and Flair; a performance-based approach. Campbell and Hlusek (2015) Canada

Professional Learning  Board – available at https://k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com/tlb/how-can-i-use-digital-storytelling-in-the-classroom/ (accessed on 26/04/19)

Teaching Primary English; Bearne (2015) Sage.
Teaching and Learning: Pedagogy, curriculum and culture; 2nd edition. Alex Moore (2012) Routledge.