| Notes |
STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
485 LASUEN MALL STANFORD, CA 94305-3096
DR. ROY PEA
David Jacks Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences And Director, H-STAR Institute
Telephone: (650) 724-3720 Fax: (650) 725-7412 Email: roypea@stanford.edu
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Charles Fadel
Founder and Chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign Harvard University, Graduate School of Education
Cambridge MA 01451 January 3, 2012
Dear Charles,
Thanks for your kind invitation. I am pleased to join your efforts as an advisor to building the Center for Curriculum Redesign at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, where I enjoyed my time as Schumann Fellow and visiting faculty member in 1986-1987.
In my studies of learning and development enhanced by technologies over many years, I’ve often emphasized the importance of meta-cognition, planning, leveraging distributed intelligence, and other aspects of human competencies that are often tacit or left out of curriculum studies and standards. Like many of my colleagues, I’m keen to see more integral support from educators for developing learner’s adaptive expertise – a framework I find preferable to 21st century skills. Once we separate ‘skills’ from expertise, which incorporates skills, knowledge, dispositions, interests, and identities—all essential aspects of competencies—we run the risk of having separate curriculum units on skills, divorced from content and other aspects of expertise. And as for ‘21st century’ – we’re only one of ten decades into it and I have little doubt that what we create today won’t be up to the challenges of the midcentury and beyond, so I think we’ll be wise to focus on the need for developing learners with the expertise for adapting to the increasingly rapid changes in the world in which they will be functioning, learning, collaborating and working. I’ll be glad to contribute insights and approaches from our NSF-funded Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center, which I co-direct, and from other related efforts in which I’m engaged with colleagues and students.
Sincerely yours,
Roy Pea, D. Phil., Oxon. |