How does the instructor lead the students to the right curriculum standards? If we look back at the structures being employed at the five different schools showcased in Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century, we can see it is not necessarily about the outcome and more about the process. In a day in age when a student can simply type any question into his/her cell phone and receive the answer in seconds, is the memorization of facts that crucial of a skill? Instead, it is more important for the student to know where to look and what to look for. It is more important to know how to use resources then to simply know information. In order for the PBL and creative learning to be successful, the student must learn to be a new learner.
This means the student cannot simply undergo learning methods and practices used in 20th century classrooms. Instead, the new learner must become an innovator. Tom Kelley is the author of the best-seller, The Art of Innovation, and is the general manager of IDEO. As such, innovation has become his life’s calling. IDEO pulls from more than 400 interdisciplinary professionals, including designers, engineers and strategists. These professionals have grown a world-leading design firm which develops innovative products for such companies as Procter & Gamble, Pepsi-Cola, and Samsung. In his work, The Ten Faces of Innovation, Kelley explores the roles each of his people play in IDEO and how new ideas are formed. One of these roles that Kelley defines, is key to the success of not only innovative business but also to creative learning. When student emulate this role and the functions of this role, they become creative problem solvers and can exploit the deep richness of a PBL. This role is the Cross-Pollinator. According to Kelley, this type of innovator “draws associations and connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts to break new ground. Armed with a wide set of interests, an avid curiosity, and an aptitude for learning and teaching, the Cross-Pollinator brings in big ideas from the outside world to enliven their organization. People in this role can often be identified by their open mindedness, diligent note-taking, tendency to think in metaphors, and ability to reap inspiration from constraints” (Kelley, 9).
In this paper, and my other writings, I rely on the biological term for cross-pollination: allogamy. This comes from the processes of cross-pollinating ideas which is the future fundamental in American education. Autogamy – the self-fertilization – is the teacher dictating to the student within a rigid curriculum, course and test-orientated learning model. Allogamy is fluid, embracing flow and being open to the combination of new ideas. For Kelley, the cross-pollination of ideas is about juxtaposing two opposing or totally unrelated concepts and developing clever innovations (Kelley, 68). What this means is that ideas mix from different sources and blend naturally, smoothly and consistently throughout. In nature, birds and bees are the agents of cross-pollination. It starts when a bee travels to a flower and gathers pollen. As the bee goes from flower to flower, it picks up parts of one plant and leaves this bit in another. Pollen from one flower mixes with the next, so on and so forth. By doing so, the bee helps the crop of flowers become heartier – the next generation of flowers will benefit from genetic diversity.
This allows the flowers to be better prepared to deal with environmental challenges as they continue to reproduce with greater variety. Allogamous education models work in the very same way. Students travel from source to source, picking up ideas and bits of research. As they combine this information, they become innovative and seek their own solutions. If given a strong PBL structure, the student can allogamously discover – pull from the sources and solve problems. So in allogamous education, PBL facilitators and creative learners are the agents of cross-pollinating ideas. Pulling from a source or a topic and then mixing it with another, makes that information richer.
A truly interdisciplinary approach requires this mixing and blending, but it must be done in such a way that the different sources conjoin to form a new material. It is not enough to simply place topics or ideas next to one another. This is co-disciplinary not interdisciplinary. If we want to serve the needs of 21st century learners we need to develop curriculums and lessons which seamlessly blend ideas from multitude of sources. This is how American education systems will compete with creativity-rich curriculums in Britain, the EU and China.
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