Learning and Teaching: Is There Life On Mars?

I've just finished reading an article in the Guardian Online by Amanda Ulrich about Mars College. I would encourage you to do the same. It details an alternative form of education delivered in at a desolate dessert campus miles from anywhere.

The reason this article resonated with me however was not the hippy isolationism (that being said I live in a farm house miles from anywhere) but the attitude to learning and education. The idea that everyone is a student and everyone is a teacher. I truly subscribe to this idea. I seldom deliver a lesson in which I do not learn something from the student. It is my belief that too many teachers see education as a one way street. It isn't. If an educator falls into the trap of believing that they are the font of all knowledge they become as much a victim of Dunning-Kruger as anyone else.

I've invested a great deal of time and research into the rather disingenuously named field of 'Reverse Innovation.' Reverse innovation is broadly the field that looks at invention and discovery developing in 'emerging' economies and being implemented in Western Nations. Now, if you sense a tone in how I have described this process that would because there was. I feel the idea is derogatory and arrogant. Even the use of the word 'reverse' implies that only white Europeans can have novel ideas and that for innovation to come from anywhere but Northern Europe and the good-ol'US-of-A, is somehow perverse.

I feel the same way about education and the flow of knowledge. If we enter into an educational relationship believing that knowledge can only flow from educator to student then we impose an ignorance and inhibition to growth and curiosity; for both parties!

So, this is why I like the idea of Mars College. Everyone has something to learn; everyone has something to teach.

Did you know that axolotls can develop as land based, aquatic, or amphibious depending on where they mature? They can swap between having gills or lungs? I didn't until a student told me.