Cel IT™
Exploratory Learning Environments (ELE)
Contextualised Learning
Course and Unit Outlines -
Learning Theories
Pedagogic Principles
Learning Rooms
ELE Contexts
- Advancement
- Belief Systems
- Conflict & Disaster
- Cultural Hertiage
- Environment
- Gender Issues
- Globalization
- History Repeats
- Knowledge is Power
- Natural Resources
- Urbanisation and Waste Management
- Weather Patterns
Assessment for Learning
Rubrics
These courses and units of work encourage students to investigate and experiment with the context to uncover relationships and make meaning based on an understanding of their own reality.
Instead of providing information, channelling views of learning, the ELE design contexts are based on natural learning and a constructivist-postmodern approach to the learning process which emphasises activities like construction, representation, exploration, synthesis of information, communication and collaboration as crucial facets of learning.
Contextual learning: occurs in close relationship with actual experience, allowing students to uncover relationships and make their own meaning based on an understanding of their own reality.
Accommodating the learning styles of all students requires the use of a variety of learning strategies, multiple ways of organizing curriculum content, and diverse contexts for learning-opportunities.
ELE Contexts Contextual teaching and learning strategies provide:
- supportive learning environments recongnises the need for a varities of contextual situations for students to engage with the real world so they are not restricted by subject or discipline boundaries
- emphasize exploratory learning and investigations,
- opportunities to experiment with critical thinking - hypotheses to make connections and disclose relationships and meaningfulness - relating new to existing experience.
- to discover and to test alternatives experimentally
- opportunities for inquiry based learning through abstract thinking, reasoning interpretation, analysis organizing and problem-solving.
- empower students to reflect, monitor and direct their own learning so they become self-regulated learners;
- Cooperative learning through encouraging group activities and sharing discovery learning.
- ICT's supporting communication for co-discovery and information access.
The current model of schooling may more appropriately belong to earlier in the twentieth century. It was developed to educate the masses for work in the industrial era.
More importantly, it belongs to a print-based culture in which knowledge is owned by those who can access books in which it is recorded.
Success is examined and certified by teachers, testing an individual's ability to apply that knowledge. Classroom structure, timetabled lessons, content-based instruction and classes organised sequentially by age are features of the print-based school.
The relevance of this model in the next century needs to be critically examined.
An Exploratory Learning Environment (ELE) is left completely to the user and this encourages learners to explore and experiment to uncover relationships and to make meaning based on an understanding of their own reality. Students are immersed in a learning context and explore, investigate, interpret and explain in light of their own preconceptions, motivations, experiences and expectations.
The Inquisitors were the first to formalize the idea that to every question there is a right answer. The answer is known, but the question must be asked and correctly answered. Relativism, humanism, common sense and moral beliefs were all irrelevant to this process because they assume doubt. (Saul, 1993:41)