Lloyd Hopkin presenting the keynote and doing a wonderful job of persuading this audience of business leaders, educators and adult students to support our theory of change.
Project overview
The starting point for our research is a recent report by a UK government minister, Alan Milburn which addresses the question of why over million young people in the UK are currently not in work education or training.
Subproject 1 is an events programme designed for audiences in Wales – to present, test and refine our theory of change. Subproject two is more theoretical and develops a framework we can share with other nations in the UK and beyond that don’t share our National Curriculum in Wales. England and Wales are both nations in the UK but each has its own curriculum.
As such the project has two subprojects which address the same real world opportunity and problem from two different directions and a third subproject that brings them together. Via the combination of subprojects we aim to address gaps in education in Wales, England and overseas and boost future generations chances of living happy, healthy and prosperous lives.
Introduction – The Future of Work and what the picture looks like for young people finishing education today,
When it comes to getting a job, the messages bombarding the ears of our young people are filled with doom and gloom.
In the UK, a million young people are ‘NEET’, not in Education, Employment or Training. That is around one in eight young people, and the number is rising. No wonder young people are gloomy: Every advertised job gets hundreds of applications and young people are competing with older adults who already have experience of work. And that’s not the last of it – the number of advertised jobs for new starters is dwindling because it’s cheaper and more efficient to give simpler tasks to AI.
It makes you wonder, if you’re 16-24 why bother getting up at all?
Alan Milburn’s investigation into why youth unemployment is so high explains that a growing proportion are “bedroom dwellers” – over the course of their education they have become separated from their places of learning and communities and are now trying to live their lives entirely online – from their personal devices at home. When they start looking for work, they are competing with hundreds of others for each job and frequently hearing nothing further – not even a rejection. The demoralising impact of feeling invisible and unwanted drives many to seek support with mental health. Milburn’s conclusion is stark: youth disengagement is a moral tragedy and an economic crisis for the UK.
What it means to live life to the full
Shortly we’ll introduce Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, the Curriculum for Wales and Swansea University’s system of 5Ps and explain how each of these help us to respond to that challenge, but first there’s a stereotype we intend to challenge that people who work with their minds alone must be more intelligent than people who also work with their hands. We see the stereotype in practice when universities are branded as where you go if you like to focus on “brain work” and technical training as where you go if you prefer to put on a hard-hat, keep moving and leave thinking to other people to do.
The reality is that the world always needs ‘thinkers and doers’ and life is never simply one thing or the other and people are at their best when they hold these in combination. Builders on site can and should be encouraged to see and prevent accidents before they happen. Learning to be an engineer at school or university includes time tinkering with equipment. Composers write music in their minds because they live in a world of real instruments. Historians discover new ways to talk about the past – because they know how it feels (good and bad) to have critics respond to their work. We are physically, socially and spiritually embedded, relational and agentic in the world.
Our project responds to this stereotype by developing a broader understanding of intelligence and how it is cultivated. Drawing on Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences, we start from the observation that education systems operating a traditional curriculum raised concerns that the put too much emphasis on directive teaching, testing, memorisation and recall. While these capabilities matter, they capture only part of what enables young people to flourish in education, employment and life. Thus a concept of intelligence that reduces it to ‘brainwork’ seems to forget that ‘brains’ grow and get smarter because we are driven by curiosity and constantly investigating and exploring the world. We take as a reference point – and source of inspiration – Howard Gardner’s theory for multiple intelligences. Gardner argued that in Education, becoming ‘intelligent’ should mean much more than memorising and repeating fragments of decontextualised knowledge.
The vision for intelligence that Gardner aims to establish is all the more relevant today. At Swansea University post-lockdown – we sought ways to incentivise students to come back to campus – to experience their courses to the full. The research led to a schema of 5 Ps where each ‘P’ demonstrates a way that lockdown reduced the university experience.
How we introduced our Events Programme – to stakeholders and influencers who are concerned about young people’s futures in Wales
The need for the project
A million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEET). [gov.uk], [assets.pub…ice.gov.uk], [mentalhealth-uk.org]
Our conceptual framework and solution Our project responds by developing a broader understanding of intelligence and how it is cultivated. Drawing on Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences, we start from the observation that education has become increasingly dominated by teaching, testing, memorisation and recall. While these capabilities matter, they capture only part of what enables young people to flourish in education, employment and life. Gardner’s theory provides a foundation for understanding intelligence as multidimensional
The concept of intelligence that reduces it to ‘brainwork’ seems to forget that ‘brains’ grow and get smarter because we are driven by curiosity and constantly investigating and exploring the world. Howard Gardner presented his theory of multiple intelligences to say that while people are in Education, becoming ‘intelligent’ should mean much more than memorising and repeating fragments of decontextualised knowledge.
The bottom line is that whether you’re in Education, Training or Work, life is more fun and exciting if you are engaging with other people in-person, working on real-world projects that will bring benefits to other people and buoyed up by places that welcome your presence and ignites your imagination so that everyone in the room is bouncing off the walls with ideas. What’s miserable is what happened to us in lockdown. Many of us swapped our physical connections and in-person interactions with our local communities and places of learning – for what we could do at home, alone and sitting behind a screen. For a while we became a nation of ‘bedroom dwellers’, snuggled in our duvets, trying and in some cases succeeding in getting our motivation from AI chatbots and digital games that applauded our achievements with digital fireworks.
HOW TO CREATE WELL ROUNDED INDIVUALS, POSTPANDEMIC AND IN THE AGE OF GENAI
The design and introduction of new technologies and pedagogies is central to our project.
Children’s mathematical intelligence is a major priority in schools and there is a plethora of devices and activities available to support this aspect of development. At the same time, most if not all the devices that are widely in use including tablets, laptops and calculators are designed for one child at a time. The next generation of these tools is even more individualised as personal AI assistants are built directly into them. This matters as the focus on solitary work leaves schools still searching for ways to address a stubborn post pandemic crisis around social anxiety and school avoidance. The Calculator Dance mat is designed to boost children’s development in areas of intelligence that working with personal devices neglect – including the confidence to work with others, to communicate clearly, and to feel that they belong in their classroom community. That’s where the Calculator Dance Mat comes in. It is a very low cost supersized floor‑based keypad made from number and function tiles that children step on. Teachers can make their own, using materials in school or come to us for support with sourcing materials. The Calculator Dance Mat combines the development of children’s maths skills with the opportunity to add puzzles and games that boost these other aspects of development. It can be used in ‘performance mode’ where children use the keys to create mathematical dances and in classroom mode where they are working as a group to solve puzzles and carry out calculations. So that we can track and assess the impacts of our interventions, we are labelling as another branch of intelligence – children’s capacity for in-person sociability and collaboration.
The image above depicts the Calculator Dance mat in performance mode. It was created by Berry Billingsley using GenAI
At our launch event participants tested another activity and technology that we have started to trial in primary schools – the Binary game.
We practiced together – in pairs – with each of our four hands representing a binary number (1, 2, 4, 8) and discovered we could count to 15 by raising our hands in sequence. The technology we add to this activity consists of a set of four microbits (little gadgets available in most schools and easy to order from school suppliers) It means that players can be set puzzles and the computer shows whether they have the correct answer.
hand raised to depict the number value In a traditional education system there is a division between the “thinkers” and the “doers” – and separate pathways for students heading for technical careers and those heading to university – a choice described as ‘hard hat versus gown’
In Wales by contrast we have an ‘aims-based’ curriculum which calls on schools to create well-rounded individuals who have the confidence and ambition to ‘get up, get out and get busy’ in a rapidly changing world. Schools and universities are safe places where you can experiment with different versions of yourself and choose courses that will help to qualify you for a job.
And then there was the pandemic … and everything closed. Suddenly the streets were empty and the sound of traffic was replaced by softer, gentler sounds like birdsongs and leaves rustling in trees.
But most people were stuck inside for most of the day – and education went entirely online. For an extended period of time learning was reduced to what you can do on your own, inside and looking at a screen. To understand how lockdown affected children’s intellectual development we are proposing to map our aims-based curriculum onto Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. The aim is to check that we can use a framework of multiple intelligences to represent the ‘Curriculum for Wales’ – a step we can repeat for other curricula around the world. In that way Gardner’s theory becomes a translation tool to bring international curricula together. And some schools already apply Gardner’s model as it is!