Make like a tree - and learn

I'm sure it hasn't escaped your attention that botanical metaphors are being increasingly used to describe a variety of aspects of education, and especially digital learning. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau  likened the outcome of education to the yielding of fruit, and highlighted the need for cultivation of knowledge. We now hear many referring to education as a kind of gardening, where learners are nurtured like young plants, watered and fed regularly, and cared for by the gardener (i.e. the teacher). Ideas are propagated, learning should be rooted in pedagogy, students are encouraged to blossom, and there is a learning ecosystem. Independent, self determined learning has also been framed using botanical metaphors. John Gardner (no relation) once declared 'Too often we are giving our students cut flowers, when we should really be teaching them to grow their own plants.' That is an excellent way to describe autonomous, student centred learning. I also got in on the act and tweeted recently that the regular testing of children is like constantly uprooting plants to see how well they are growing. Contentious, hmm?

One of the most recent metaphors uses root structures as a way to describe networked learning. Canadian teacher Dave Cormier borrowed from the earlier post-modernist work of Deleuze and Guattari to create his rhizomatic learning theory. Rhizomes are chaotic root structures that have no centre and whose boundary is constantly changing, because they constantly send out new shoots. The rhizome metaphor epitomises personalised learning, where every learner's approach can be unique. It aptly describes learning through digital media such as hyperlinking, where students seem to be digressing from prescribed pathways, but ultimately discover for themselves new, personalised pathways to explore, and serendipitously encounter pertinent content and experiences.  Students become the nodes of their own production, creating content and sharing it through social media tools, much the same way a gardener would cast seed on the ground. I heard Stephen Lethbridge (Principal of Taupaki School in New Zealand) speak of watering plants rather than rocks in his mLearn14 speech. The plants were those teachers who are open to new ideas, and the rocks are those who resist, Stephen explained.

Botanical metaphors abound in education, because learning is a process of growth and transformation. The metaphor and the reality have a natural affinity, and we use them because we all look for simple ways to describe and understand things better. The metaphor is not solely limited to learning, but can also be applied to the tools and technologies we use to support our learning. When I was in Sydney, I found myself making a video in the city's splendid botanical gardens. The subject of my video was wikis in education - another one in my '3 Things' series. Here is the short video I made, which includes one or two botanical metaphors. See if you can spot them...



Other videos in the 3 Things video series:
3 things you should know about Twitter
3 things you should know about blogging
3 things you should know about digital literacies
3 things you should know about Edupunk
3 things you should know about Open Scholarship

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Make like a tree - and learn by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.