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Accelerated Education as an Instrument of Disruption

Mon, March 11, 6:30 to 8:00pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Terrace Level, Hibiscus B

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Writing on “The Purpose of Education” for his college newspaper in 1947, Dr. Martin Luther King explained that “The function of education… is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.” The pursuit of education is not just a matter of accumulating knowledge or even, King elaborates, “of reason. [Rather,] it must be imbued with morality, enabl[ing] a man [or woman] to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his [or her] life.”
Extrapolating from this individualistic purpose of formal education, King would surely not argue that it is proper to aspire to schooling that enables communities and all of society to “become more efficient” in achieving “legitimate goals” for all people. Certainly, identifying “legitimate goals” can lead folks into highly contested spaces, both moral and practical. Most basically, “legitimate goals” for many are those that conserve traditional ideas and practices. For others, such as King, it is the disruption of conventions that seems legitimate. In America today, these perspectives are epitomized by protests that alternately favor and oppose many issues, including such hot topics as abortion rights, gun ownership, and racial, LGBTQ+, and gender justice. Schools have become prominent battlegrounds for such confrontations, including mainly what and how we teach.
This panel looks to education programs, notably, accelerated ones, in a sample of low-income countries to offer insights into how alternative education programs can create space for all to aspire to and attain “legitimate” goals. In many low-income country contexts, there is little to virtually no room to address such hot topics critically, whether in school or out.
Tackling these within school can be fraught with danger. Yet, if disrupting the beliefs and practices that undermine the legitimate goals of individuals, communities, and nations doesn’t occur at school, there are few other places to turn. The challenge, then, is to disrupt in ways that are not perceived as disruptions but as positive change, tackling widely accepted problems while seeding learners with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that will equip them with the skills needed to reach their goals and become effective agents of change.
Accelerated education has proven in many low-income countries to serve as an effective space for equipping students to become virtuous disruptors. This is true both during and after their school years and both at home and nationwide. Whether introducing regular handwashing to family members, mobilizing communities to provide equal education opportunities to girls and children with disabilities, taking action against climate change, or fostering other virtuous disruptions, accelerated and other alternative education programs can produce students to catalyze change now and in the future in ways that typically eludes conventional instruction. How?
Usually aimed at overaged out-of-school children, a core feature of common accelerated education programs is the use of a condensed curriculum. Enabling teachers to cover two or three years of curriculum in a typical one-year school calendar is not a matter of getting them to teach at double or triple speed. Rather, it starts by stripping down each grade level’s curriculum to the fundamental learning outcomes while removing content that may be redundant, outdated, overly generic, or relevant in only some settings. Then, program implementers train and support teachers to deliver lessons that lead students to achieve this fundamental learning.
Some accelerated programs focus simply on helping students receive their primary leaving certificate, attaining a formal academic credential qualifies them for further schooling or vocational training or to pass straight into life and livelihood. Others feature the vocational purpose, solidifying students’ functional literacy and numeracy while adding technical and, perhaps, entrepreneurial training to ready them for specific employment opportunities.
A third group of accelerated education programs capitalizes on the space provided by the stripped-down curriculum to deliver lessons that foster the kind of disruptive learning to which King alludes above. This is learning that leads students purposefully and strategically to current “legitimate goals” that they first identify and then pursue for themselves, their families, and their communities. Rather than expecting teachers to deliver the exact same academic content using the exact same instructional methods for all students, these programs equip and expect teachers to enrich the core learning outcomes by bringing in knowledge and skills from the local context. They enlist teachers to enliven the condensed curriculum by teaching students to use the academic content practically. Lastly, they favor active play-based, learner-centered instructional methods that favor students’ academic and practical learning while also deliberately fostering personal competencies such as critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, planning, and self-regulation.
In the end, and perhaps counterintuitively, by adding such content and pedagogic practices to lessons, teachers gain valuable instructional time. This happens in three ways. One, students learn better, both more quickly and more deeply. Two, they retain what they have learnt, building a solid foundation for future learning. Three, they are more attentive, permitting the teacher to allocate more time to students’ learning than to classroom management and discipline.
Eyeing these results, it is enticing to consider how accelerated education programs might also play a disruptor role at a system level. Typically implemented to improve school access, these programs also illuminate a promising path to improved quality. As described, the condensed curriculum opens the door for teachers actually to practice many of the instructional methods that systems have been training and exhorting them to use for years – notably, learner-centered, contextualized lessons, small group learning, and continuous formative assessment – but that teachers feel unable to use largely because of the typically overburdened official curriculum.
The panelists will share the experience of three prominent accelerated education programs, explaining both the prospects and strategies for disruption and concrete disruptive achievements across a variety of education systems.

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