ABSTRACT
("Thinking dDifferently about lLearning and tTeaching") begins with the questions "Why do we need to think differently about learning and teaching? To what extent is it possible to think in new ways about leadership, about learning and about their inter-relationship?" Discussing the second Carpe Vitam principle - creating favourable conditions for learning - it is argued that the process of learning is hugely susceptible to the environment in which it takes place. From womb to classroom, evidence shows the powerful in-built capacity of human beings to adapt to the constraining forces that shape their mental models of the world. These include perceptions of relationships, of authority, of ourselves, our capacities and destinies. The necessary complement to David Perkins's characterisation of "learning in captivity" is "teaching in captivity" - teachers and taught bound together by convention, curriculum, and "deliverology". These insights carry far-reaching implications with regard to language, the "labels" and the categories we draw on to describe and differentiate students and the forms of assessment that we rely on to make categorical judgements. Case studies of innovative approaches to learning in the wild demonstrate a range of possibilities for thinking, and acting, differently. In Robert Mackenzie's (1965) Escape from the Classroom, the description of his pupils' physical release from the constraints of the timetable was more an escape from the conventions of the mind than from the rigors of routine. His was not a de-schooling agenda but a way of expanding physical and intellectual parameters so that return to the classroom was always invested with new insights and new ways of seeing (advocated in Chapter 3). Dialogue comes into its own here as an influential and authoritative strategy connecting people collegially across institutional boundaries and without deference to hierarchies.
