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ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, DR. LOUIS GALEA, AT THE OPENING OF THE 1ST LET-ME-LEARN CONFERENCE ON "CELEBRATING DIFFERENCES" - QAWRA - 30TH JULY 2001
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30/07/2001
30/07/2001
| I have just been trying to imagine what it must be like for a teacher to | have to handle multi-level, multi-style, learner-oriented learning in the classroom. So, being a lawyer by profession, I dutifully proceeded to imagine that I have 30 clients in my legal office all at the same time. I imagined that I am trying to deal, with full professional excellence, for nine months every year, with every single one of them - but all together in the same room and in a different way for each person. I have to find out what each person needs, what each person is motivated to do, and how each person is to be challenged – but not too much or too little – to do his or her exploration and get the results that he or she specially needs. Some of my simultaneous 30 clients are causing trouble rather noisily in the room, and I have to cope with what they are doing and understand why they are doing it. Some of the others may not appear so overtly demanding of my attention, but professionally I have no doubt at all that there are thirty whole human worlds in there, all demanding to be deeply explored and deeply fulfilled and expanded. |
| As you can imagine, that is where I had to sit down | weakly and reach for a glass of water…! |
| The task seems impossibly daunting. But isn't that, | after all, just what teachers are expected to do with their students, all with their diverse learning styles and motivations? So please, the educators among you here today, please rest assured that I do know: the subject of today is not to be treated glibly or lightly. |
| Differentiated teaching of any kind requires great | skill and specific methods of analysis and of classroom intervention. We should therefore be grateful to everyone connected with the Let Me Learn project in Malta, and with seminars and conferences such as this one today, for helping to make these skills and methods better known. |
| I would also like to remind us all here today that | the introduction of learner-centred projects and approaches such as the Let Me Learn process is not just a fashion, and that it comes from a context that is much wider than the class-room or the school. In the whole world, in a variety of fields, there are trends towards less regimentation, more responsiveness. Less uniformity and more celebration of diversity. Less preconception and more openness to being surprised. These are valuable trends, and an important aspect of the human journey into the future. They are also, I believe, new survival mechanisms for the human race, and they may be some of the best forms, on the one hand, of protection that we now have against war and dictatorship, and, on the other, to foster peace, dialogue, human rights and democracy. |
| As a person in public life, I can see quite well that | our societies need youths and adults that approach learning and doing and being in a diversity of ways. There are children and young people whose learning style is sequential, others whose learning style is precise with a fascination with small details. There are still others who learn by solving problems as independent thinkers, and yet others who learn in flashes of intuitive insight. Our communities and our nations need the adults that children with these tendencies will become. All of them. We need their special perceptions and learning skills, their approaches. We need families and groups and work-place teams and government departments where people think and learn and contribute in splendidly different ways, and where people respect each other's difference just as much as each other's similarities. |
| Notions such as that of multiple intelligences | introduced by Howard Gardner have helped us to recognise, understand, tolerate, and indeed celebrate differences in persons as learners. It is not so long ago that we were assessing and classifying people by means of an "IQ" that reflected only one of several dimensions of intelligence. Such ways of recognizing and understanding diversity help teachers, parents, and students themselves to cope with differences among people, and to understand also those unused potentials often hidden in oneself. Parents in this way would have a tool for their own empowerment in helping their children to do better in school and in their personal development. Imagine the extent to which we could avoid all the misunderstandings, the false expectations, the failures, the grief - if only the links between parents, children and school were based on identifying and building upon the child's inherent and preferred learning styles! |
| Teaching as if learners are (and should be) different | is not easy, I know. But such teaching is worth the effort, because I have no doubt that these ideas are analytical tools and attitudes that enrich not only our professions and education systems but also the whole fabric of our society. We can hope to celebrate differences among people in society at large only after we understand a little more about these differences. |
| Over the past fifty years many societies had to | absorb the massification of education at all levels. In Malta this took place in three twenty-years cycles. In the fifties we proceeded to put in place primary education for all. This was followed in the seventies with secondary education for all. In the nineties, of last century, we embarked on post-secondary and tertiary education for all. And here we are today, in this Conference, attempting to reconcile the age of ‘mass education’, an essentially social and collective process on the one hand, with learning as an intensely individual and personal process on the other. |
| We believe we have addressed the issue in no | uncertain terms in Malta’s National Curriculum, "Creating the Future Together". We have made a conscious choice – for inclusiveness, recognising, celebrating and exploiting diversity, believing this will enhance better the chance for the common good. |
We are also doing our best to walk our talk. Government has approved a mult-million Malta liri programme of investment in human resources, physical facilities, tools and new structures. Parliament’s Social Affairs Committee has just completed a constructive long hearing on the Strategic Plan Implementing the National Curriculum. It is encouraging to note the genuine interest and the broad, even if reasonably cautious, consensus. An agreement with the Unions in the field ought to improve the chance of real progress in the next few years.
| We also have new national structures: a National | Curriculum Council with a very broad mandate to oversee, empower and catalyse the implementation of the Curriculum over its life-time; a Foundation for Educational Services intended to be a flexible complimentary tool for schools to support them in their efforts to recognise and facilitate the diverse abilities of children and students; another Foundation forTomorrow’s Schools has been mandated to implement an eight year programme to provide quality accessible schools in the whole public sector. |
| We are also implementing a programme to introduce | Information Technology and Technology Education in all classes in all schools at primary and secondary level. Next October a new post-sixteen Vocational College is expected to receive its first students. |
| This college has been instructed to be open to all, | equipped with a strong unit to provide basic education to those who might need it, and to certify prior learning experience as a valuable asset on which to build further education and training. The College will be continuously audited by the National Qualifications Council also set up last year. |
| All this and many more initiatives like the Let Me | Learn Project, the St James Cavalier Creativity Centre, the NGO Paulo Freire Institute, are intended to help all stakeholders cope with the complex but marvelous world of diversity amongst children. I know that school time-tables, teachers’ methods, parents’ attitudes, and maybe even school architecture have to be taken into account and often changed if we are going to take seriously such methods of collective but individualised learning. The going is tough and at times excruciating. But it is also exciting and extremely satisfying in terms of the inner peace and contentment with which all those who genuinely immerse themselves in this process would be blessed. |
| But this business of collective and individualised | learning reminds me again of my lawyers' office room where there are still those 30 clients all clamouring at once for my attention. I wonder what would happen if I paired some of the clients off with each other, or sat the rest of them in small groups. |
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