#LearningIs doing

Photo of Manon by Unesco

I was privileged to share the stage with a school student during the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week  symposium. Held each year in Paris, under the shadow of the iconic Eiffel Tower, #MLW2016 attracted delegates from almost every nation in the world, who came together to spend 5 days learning about the latest news and research on mobile learning.

My panel session featured three academic colleagues, and Manon van Hoorebeke, a 13-year old school girl from Belgium. Manon was 11 when she won the 2014 award of European Digital Girl for her work coding with Scratch and Arduino. She learnt her skills at Coderdojo events, and now passes these on to other children. Her dream is to encourage more girls to become involved in technology, and wants more schools to teach children how to use technology in primary schools.

When asked how she best learned in school, she was scathing about traditional teaching, preferring instead to learn by doing and making. She said that she and her school friends liked to be presented with challenges and problems they could solve, rather than being told what the answers were. As a representative of her generation of learners, it was also refreshing to hear her talk frankly about why it is important for children in school to be given access to technologies.

Photo courtesy of United Nations on Flickr

When quizzed on what she thought about schools exams, she declared that they had bad connotations amongst her friends, because to fail them would be to displease their parents. She was concerned that the pressure placed on children by exams in schools meant that they learnt little from testing. This was a shame, she said, because everything that happens in school should make good learning. Testing has the potential to help children to learn, she said, but failure is seen as bad. It should be seen as a positive thing which all could learn from. These remarks became the basis for some extended discussion about assessment by the rest of the panel.

Along with the hundreds of delegates present at UNESCO Headquarters, I was impressed by Manon's courage to sit on the stage under the lights in front of a large international audience, speak in reasonably fluent English, and teach the gathered experts in the room a thing or two about what school should really be like. And all at the age of just 13. My comment following from her remarks was that everyone in the room and all educators should pay attention to Manon and her generation of learners. They are not the future, I said, they are the present, and we must find ways to engage them in learning in ways that are relevant to them - and that includes embedding personal and mobile technologies into the mix. It will also require some changes in pedagogy, so that children become more involved in active learning, where doing and making situate their education.

Manon's blog Better be a Digital Girl is well worth a read. Also read her interview for UNESCO following the panel discussion.


#LearningIs doing by Steve Wheeler was written in Paris, France and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.