Education: A Group Project

I put off writing this blog post because it’s very difficult for me to connect with the concept of instilling lifelong learning. I barely interact with the university students I help make classes for. I’m more focused on ensuring they’re learning the content specific to the course they’re taking. Obviously lifelong learning is important, I mean I even work at the old University building in Regina, home of the lifelong learning center. It’s very important for us to never stop learning. I work with many instructors who don’t have great tech skills but do have a willingness to learn, and after a semester or two they can almost run their online course all on their own.

The concept of lifelong learning isn’t what I found difficult, it was the requirement for community and parental involvement that throws me for a loop. Every week of content in our course sort of feels like it’s been saying “Teachers have to do this” or “Teachers have to consider that”. It’s a lot of extra responsibility being piled on to most of you in this class. It seems incredibly unfair. Then thanks to Andrea’s reading, Empowering the Future: How Digital Literacy in Schools is Shaping the Next Generation, I learned that lifelong learning cannot simply be taught by teachers. It takes the help of parents, and even the rest of the community to encourage continual learning.

Now literally every single topic we’ve discussed would function better if the parents got involved, but for the most part I’ve focused on the aspect we can control, Ourselves. We don’t know if a parent will follow through with what we suggest. Instead we just have to use our time in the classroom to try our best to encourage the importance of all these digital literacy aspects into the students (I’m using the royal we here. I’m not in the classroom). Maybe that’s just my inexperience in the field coming through, but my assumption really has been that sometimes getting the parents involved has got to be incredibly challenging.

Flashforward to these discussions on lifelong learning and suddenly I’m hit with the thought that just accepting we can only control our own actions isn’t good enough. Hoping we can teach them all about digital literacy in the classroom isn’t good enough. We NEED the help of the parents. I’ve heard the question “How can you motivate your students?” a lot recently. There are plenty of ways to do this. As long as the teacher is passionate about their work they’re certain to find a way to do so. But lifelong learning has forced me to face a question I have had no answer to so far in my Master’s Ed courses:

How can you motivate the parents?

I would love to hear from all of you on how you try to approach this. Not even necessarily about digital literacy, but any topic or issue that arose where you said to yourself “This can’t be handled in the classroom alone. The parents have to get involved”. It’s highly unlikely I will ever have to deal with parents in my position, I rarely deal directly with the students, but this is one area that has stumped me all throughout this course and my previous one, so I would be thrilled with any insight into how it can be done.