2020 Annual Review

Educating for Today and Tomorrow: Our Concept of a Broad-Based Liberal Education

DR BRUCE ADDISON DEPUTY PRINCIPAL (ACADEMIC)

2020 was an extraordinary year. In Australia, we started the year with bushfires. Everything turned on its head with the emergence of COVID-19.

When the clock turned 12.00.01 on January 1 2020, no one could have foreseen what was going to unfold. Who knows what the future will hold; to some extent, the only certainty will be uncertainty and the reality that life will remain very different from what it was before. As I write this article, trade tensions and problematic diplomacy is emerging between China and Australia. Nationalism and protectionism will shatter and perhaps has helped to shatter, the idea of globalisation—an idea that promised much but perhaps failed to deliver. The world has had an American President who rejected precedent by not accepting the will of the people gracefully. Social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, continue to give voice to unprecedented ignorance and extremism—ignorance and extremism that is being used both knowingly and unknowingly to destabilise liberalism and democratic freedom. Climate change has not gone away. Neither has its partner extreme weather. Insurers are refusing to insure or are charging prohibitive premiums. This could change settlement patterns significantly, reshaping our lifestyles dramatically. In the midst of all of this, schools continue to do what schools have always done. We have classrooms with four walls, there are buildings, there are ovals and there are green spaces. Teachers teach and students learn. It all seems ageless. Those who understand classrooms know that they may look similar but are in fact very different. There is now a broad arsenal of empirically-based teaching strategies available to teachers. The alchemy still ultimately rests on ‘effective’ teaching and the willingness of students to engage with their learning. Nowadays we know that there are many reasons for seeming non-engagement, whereas yesterday

‘carelessness’ was all too readily used as a destructive descriptor. Contemporary methodology, by design, helps to encourage visible thinking and learning (Ritchhart, 2015; Ritchhart and Church, 2020). Digital technology, in its many guises, has had a massive impact on our classrooms. The laptop can now seem to be as indispensable as the lunch box, the calculator and exercise book. So much is at the fingertips of students, especially if they live in the right postcodes. This divide is still palpable and is becoming wider and increasingly problematic (Hargreaves, 2020). Technology is a blessing yet it is also an unhelpful disrupter. The effect size of digital technology on student learning still remains tenuous (Hattie, 2020) and great care must be taken when weaving its magic and wonder into the curriculum. Some scholars are now emphasising the importance of slow looking and learning into the realm of curriculum design, teaching and learning methodology (Tishman, 2018). Those who ignore the problems associated with ascribing multitasking too prominent a place in the lives of young people are manifestly ignorant and are doing this generation of young people a huge disservice (Poljac, Kiesel, Koch and Muller, 2018). Realistically, kindness and relationship remains the fundamental glue that binds everything we try to achieve together. Complexity reigns from the global geo-strategic level, right through to the local school level. Who knows where it will end. The future will be both challenging and difficult but is also laden with an array of wonderful opportunities. What does this mean for Brisbane Girls Grammar School? One thing we treasure dearly is our articulation of our concept of a broad-based liberal education.

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Brisbane Girls Grammar School Annual Review 2020