1. INDIVIDUALIZATION + COLLABORATION: A model for innovation
Katherine Watson Coastline Distance Learning, CA Bizarrissime@gmail.com
One of the most-often cited advantages of twenty-first-century online learning is its quality of
customizability. That is, malleable “learning plans”, if not entire curricula, may now be tailored to
individual students’ desires online in ways that were cumbersome, if not impossible, only a decade ago.
Indeed, in the United States and abroad, a movement has developed that promotes programs such as
the Rhode Island (Usa) Individualized Learning Plan (ILP) to permit learners to customize, to tailor to
each individual certain singular educational programs and, additionally, to strengthen the senses of
identity, self, and command.
But in a world that is not only increasingly customized to the individual but is also ever more connected
and internationalized among groups, collaboration has come to be key as well. And in a rapidly
shrinking world, intercultural awareness, understanding, and cooperation are necessary underpinnings
to the sort of collaboration that must define every effective world-wise society in the twenty-first century.
Indeed, as Finkbeiner and Koplin (2002) have noted: “That we meet this challenge of intercultural
education (together) is critical if we are to achieve peaceful global unity.” Finkbeiner and Koplin (2002),
who are based in Kassel, Germany, propose the notion that culture comprises a kind of behavioral,
transactional glue binding together the members of a human group for subsequent or consequent
action, i.e., collaboration. And European Union countries have conceived intercultural, international,
collaborative courses of study exploiting multiple media of the sort deemed necessary to encourage the
twenty-first century “understanding (that) is vital for increasing …effective research and innovation
activity”, as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) states (Wells
and Zolyan, 2011). Exemplarily, the “Teaching Europe” European Literacy and Citizenship Education
(ELICIT) program aims to unite academics and experts as well as learners and trainees throughout the
European Union in collaborative courses of study in United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural
Organization (Unesco)-proposed savoirs (subject-matter knowledge) and compétences ((usually
technical) competencies).
If, as Unesco researchers have claimed, “the laptop is now mightier than the sword”, and if “vibrant and
varied voices” would complement one another in favor of new, sustainable benefits to be made
available to all the world’s peoples, then the seemingly contradictory pushes toward individualization on
the one hand and collaboration on the other must be harmonized. In this paper, programs that have
proven successful in achieving these ends will be examined and their potential further applicability in
innovative curriculum design will be explored.
Individualization: The ILP (individual learning plan)
Rhode Island’s Providence Public Schools Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) typify the programs being
set forth worldwide “to personalize student learning and to contribute to students’ academic, career,
and personal/social success” (West and Sutherland, 2007). As West and Sutherland (2007) cite the
Rhode Island mandate, “increased ‘personalization’ of learning for students” underlies an effort to “help
students establish personal goals and develop future plans…coordinat(ing) activities that help all
students plan, monitor, and manage their own learning as well as meet competencies in the areas of
academic, career, and personal/social development.”
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2. As the name indicates, the Individual Learning Plan aims to give students the self-assurance and –
esteem as well as the intellectual wherewithal to write and then re-write, edit, or hone their own
curricula, almost entirely on their own, and typically with the mediation of electronics. The assumption is
that “planning is important in the world of work, and so we should be helping students to become better
planners.” In this assumption, the “we” in question engages parents, teachers, counselors, tutors,
technology assistants, and/or peer advisers. As Bloom and Kissane (2011) have noted, it was the
American “Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975) (that underlay) the plans developed for
each student (that were to be) updated annually by teams of teachers, parents, school administrators,
related service personnel, and students.” Within two decades, programs originally designed in just a
few states of the Usa to support the needs of the needy were broadened to include learners of all ages
across the nation, from kindergarteners through collegians.
In Rhode Island, each educational ILP is made up of a bi-partite curriculum, including an “Academic
Learning Plan” (ALP) alongside an Individual, Physical, Social Success (I-PASS) program; many
Rhode Island schools deliver both ALPs and I-PASSes online. Since “the more personal learning
environment is essential” (West and Sutherland, 2007), “…it is driven by student needs, interests, and
learning styles.” Each ILP must be conceived in accordance with Rhode Island state standards in
English, math, science, world languages, social studies, technology, the arts, and physical education,
as well as in three student-selected electives, an internship, and a “project”. Thus, although students
are relatively free to plan their own academic programs, they must pass state-designed standardized
tests in certain “core competencies” before they finish secondary school, and they must demonstrate
“responsibility, dependability, punctuality, integrity, and effort…”, as West and Sutherland (2007) point
out. Indeed, these last qualities of the I-PASS bear at least as much, if not more, weight than do
academic attainments in the matter of obtaining a Rhode Island school diploma.
Rhode Island schools’ Academic Learning Plans (ALPs) are highly interactive, calling for learners not
just to lay out their class choices but to reflect upon those choices, too. For instance, each student must
respond in writing to questions such as: “Which courses are you interested in taking, and why?”, “Do
any of these courses require prerequisites (e.g., “Electronics” must be taken before “Maintenance and
Repair of PCs”)?”, and “How will the courses you plan to take assist you with career interests?”
Notably, the I-PASS “social success” program dovetails with students’ ALPs, promoting what Baudry
(2007) would call certain very “American cultural traits”, including clear documentation of “process”,
encouragement in the acts of “doing” and “explicitness”, and a positive sense of the social self and how
that self integrates into the greater world.
Collaboration: Teaching Europe programs
For their part, Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Spain, and France have each developed
collaborative study programs, wherein learners form groups diverse in age, socioeconomic status,
educational background, ethnicity, language, and overall culture.
Typical of these programs in collaboration, the European Literacy and Citizenship Education (ELICIT)
“multilateral lifelong learning” project comprises a consortium of sixteen institutions from eight European
Union member states with strong online presences, along with the Association Européenne de
l’Education (AEDE) umbrella institution. The collective goal is to conceive, develop, manage,
implement, evaluate, and then report upon effective, transdisciplinary courses of study leading to a new
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3. “portfolio of the European Citizen” for the twenty-first century. Courses are designed to “teach Europe”,
to educate learners in both the savoirs (subject-matter knowledge, theory, how to think and do) and
compétences (applications, practicalities) of each area of study, as suggested by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in reports made in 1995, 2000, 2002, 2005,
2008, and 2011. Realization of the ELICIT goal throughout the European educational network
comprises a principal aim of an umbrella Teaching Europe campaign.
As Harel (2010) has summarized it, the ELICIT project for “teaching Europe” has become necessary
because of the social and economic strains imposed by vast diversity, not only in Europeans’
languages, cultures, and basic demographics, but in people’s desires and expectations. Harel (2010)
suggests that this impressive diversity leads to a need for a groundwork, a set of commonalities, a base
of both savoirs and compétences that all Europeans can depend upon, and that this base be called a
Portfolio of European citizenship, where the term portfolio is meant to comprise “a reference framework
of competencies”, as well as a collaborative, interactive database of resources. Notably, just as the
aforementioned ILP encourages explicitness, “doing”, and a product, in the American way, as Baudry
(2007) has written, so do programs such as ELICIT promote underlying implicitness, “being”, and a
collaboratively developed integrated theory, idea, or vision in a typically European manner.
The principal “competencies” said to define European literacy and citizenship fall out of collaboratively
conceived, shared “values and societal vision”, as Harel states. That is, rather than setting forth
individual student learning objectives or causing each learner to devise menu-like curricula that will
meet specific state- or country-mandated demands that have been laid forth in distinct academic
domains, as is done in the Rhode Island ILP system, the ELICIT programs are all designed with an
overarching, collaboration-based worldview. Thus, in order to attain effective coopération, inclusion,
and succès, for instance, topics have been selected that can be examined, discussed, and taught from
multiple perspectives; teaching happens across disciplines, becoming therefore transdisciplinary by
definition. For example, one ELICIT topic of study comprises “The euro”: Basic arithmetic can
determine the value of the euro not only in comparison to other currencies but also within the European
Union; students can even argue about how to price a product that will be sold in eurozone countries as
well as elsewhere. And quite naturally, analysis of the euro can clearly bring in discussions of both
micro- and macro-economics, too. Furthermore, the notion of the euro with respect to national v.
super-national identity can be treated, as can symbols of national and super-national identity of other
kinds. The history of money, as well as the history and development of the euro as a currency, after it
was a simple theoretical dream, if not a megalomaniacal wish of Napoleon III, is clearly part of the
euro’s tale, as is the history of national agreements, politics, and regional power struggles. The ELICIT
student who would tackle the subject of the euro will find historical documents and lively, current,
online-delivered discussion as his resource material, provided by experts in varying academic domains.
Another exemplary ELICIT program calls for development of a concept of “glocalism”, where this
portmanteau word implies the marriage of the global and the local, with the latter generally comprising
an example of something to which students can relate easily and the former encompassing a much
broader, cross-disciplinary view of the thing. In Ireland, the National Council for Curriculum and
Assessment (NCCA) offers examples of transdisciplinary courses aiming to achieve glocalism; one of
these is “Leinster granite”, in which geology and geography, ecology, history, and chemistry, as well as
population movements and methods of human survival are all treated. “Plate tectonics, the rock cycle,
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4. and weathering and erosion” comprises a preliminary module in the course, which ultimately aims to
encourage transdisciplinary thought and analysis through the use of numerous multiple-perspective
modules of the kind proposed for worldwide educational programs by Unesco and exploited most
broadly in the European Union.
The UNESCO proposition: Savoirs, compétences, & capacités
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) has, for its part,
suggested to United Nations member states numerous generalized compétences that it sees necessary
for twenty-first century learners to have attained before they finish their schooling, whether it be
elementary, secondary, or post-secondary. Teachers, too, are expected in the Unesco plan to be not
only capables, well grounded, or “literate”, in their specialized fields and up-to-date with current
research and writings, but also to be technologically literate, that is, conversant with, if not fully
competent in, Tice, or the electronically-based technologies of information and communication,
including online-available educational materials, social media, and electronic communication
techniques. Indeed, Unesco notes, faculty, staff, and students in twenty-first-century schools must
exhibit at least four capacités, or “types of literacy”, with the technological permitting access to, if not
acquisition of, the others.
If they are to be truly effective, claim Unesco researchers, the Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) of the
type used in Rhode Island, Usa, and elsewhere, and the multi-faceted Teaching Europe programs such
as ELICIT must all begin with an ascertainment of technological literacy. And then, subject-matter
curricula can follow.
Thus, art history, English as a Second Language, français langue étrangère, or other
arts/language/culture immersion programs should hope, if not expect, learners to attain cultural literacy
by plunging themselves into alternative mindsets from the beginning of their coursework; students in
mathematics and the sciences must gain a sense of numeracy, or mathematical literacy; learners in
remedial, basic, or fundamentals courses must achieve ordinary, overall literacy; and, as Unesco has
emphasized, so should online-enhanced curricula grow from technological literacy, which in the best,
“future-forward” educational models, will imply and integrate the rest.
Typical of Unesco-conceived academic syllabi is a program of study in bioethics designed for medical
school and pre-med students. As the bioethics syllabus preface states, “Heretofore, courses in ethics
taught in schools of medicine have typically been organized around certain specific medical dilemmas,
such as the beginning and the end of life. By contrast, the new Unesco basic course is derived from
principles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Bioethical Rights, comprising a number of modules,
each one developing one of those principles.” (2008:05, translation KAW). That is, the Unesco bioethics
syllabus begins with the question of defining “ethics”, followed by that of defining “bioethics”. The
assumption is that the study of any subject matter will proceed most effectively when learners and
teachers all share and understand the same definitions of terms. Subsequent modules concern:
“Human dignity and the rights of man”; “Beneficial and detrimental effects”, “Autonomy and individual
responsibility”; “Consent”; “Respect for human vulnerability and personal integrity”; “Social responsibility
and health”; “Sharing”; “Protection of future generations”; and “Protection of the environment, the
biosphere, and biodiversity”, among others. Philosophers and legal experts join scientists and medical
doctors in teaching the course and in providing its readings.
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5. Incorporated into many United Nations member nations’ educational curricula, each Unesco syllabus,
such as the bioethics one, is normally integrated into a State-sponsored overview of a particular
subject. In some countries, such as France, a State-conceived, Web-based umbrella organization was
created during the 1990’s to lie behind the theory and then promote practice in a way that Perrenoud
(1995) calls “a construction of competencies comprising the long march of education” (1995:20). In
France, the Web-based Eduscol (https://eduscol.education.fr ) encompasses the French Ministry of
Education’s realization of the Unesco proposals, as they are to be brought to fruition in schools of
education or among academics who would execute them through plans such as the aforementioned
multi-country, collaborative ELICIT.
Eduscol features a “portail national”, a State-sponsored online-only portal, for educational
professionals, who are expected in the French system to remain continuously enrolled, engaged,
involved, and in training, both individually and collaboratively. Online-delivered materials, electronic live
chat sessions, audio/video conferencing are all exploited; resources are suggested to educators
according to their geographical and academic bases of operation. For example, medical professionals
throughout the French-speaking world are invited, if not expected by their employers, to remain
connected to Eduscol’s RNRSMS (Réseau national de ressources médico-sociales) through ListServes
or other electronic means. Exemplarily, in late February, 2013, World Water Day and the International
Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination were celebrated simultaneously, with questions of the
environment, society, population, pollution, public health, and ecology all examined and discussed
collaboratively from the individual points of view of chemists, sociologists, biologists, oncologists,
population scientists, geologists, earth scientists, medical doctors, and participants in the international
médecins sans frontières, among others, in a clearly transdisciplinary way.
Individualization, collaboration, and curriculum design in 21st-century education
As Gogoulou et al. (2007) have pointed out, and as Unesco-promoted programs have demonstrated,
the twenty-first century offers exciting opportunities for designing curricula that will effectively profit from
and execute the defining ideas of both individualization/customization and collaboration. Moreover,
increasingly available electronic communications, particularly in “social media” such as Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and the like, have rendered accessible the theories and the practices
of diverse experts, without having to attend to restrictions of time, space, or source.
Gogoulou, et al. have summarized the new twenty-first-century educational model as comprising “…a
movement of the focus from that of teaching to that of learning and from an individualistic and
objectivist view of learning to a social constructivism view” (2007:242), in which the latter entails active
interaction between each individual learner and his environment, as well as “socially mediated
knowledge” achieved most effectively through collaboration. Clearly, as Gogoulou, et al. state,
“Educational environments that attempt to combine technological learning tools with personalization
that caters for individual characteristics and learning preferences have the potential to radically alter the
landscape of learning” (2007: 243).
That is, as has been suggested in Gogoulou et al. and executed in domains as far-flung as the
aforementioned European Union ELICIT and the Chilean Edcamp Santiago
(http://edcampsantiago.wordpress.com/ ), among others, modern electronic technologies, including
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6. social media in particular, can enhance educational results by merging the individual into the
collaborative.
As Warren (2013) suggests, effective educational results—or learning—should be the product of a
diverse curriculum developed with input from numerous perspectives that share a fresh, creative
mindset. That is, curriculum ought to be conceived in collaboration, rather than in isolation, with
colleagues sharing the goal of creating something that learners will like enough to engage with and
thence to apprehend. With respect to this last, it is evident that teachers must know their learners, how
they learn, what they know, and what they want to know. Indeed, as Duit et al. (2003) have suggested,
learners are individuals with thinking minds, each mind to be respected; they are not simply passive
urns to be filled with each instructor’s notion of gold dust.
Tinzmann, et al. (1990) pursue Warren’s notion further, suggesting that “a thinking curriculum” be
developed that “involves interaction of the learner, the materials, the teacher, and the context,” not just
groups of teachers creating curriculum collaboratively among themselves without any input beyond one
another’s minds, teachers comprising a professoriate that may know how to teach but not what to
teach. The collaborative-learning teacher will become a learning mediator, in this system, according to
Tinzmann et al. (1990), helping students to connect new information to “older” information that they
may already have attained and, notably for the goal of individualization mixed with collaboration,
“helping students to figure out what to do when they are stumped…to learn how to learn (on their own).”
Tinzmann et al. (1990) offer as a specific example of integrating the individualized into the collaborative
a course in Hawaiian folkloric readings in the Kamehameha Early Education Program. Called “ETR”, for
“Experience-Text-Relationship”, the course offers an initial brief summary of a text, accompanied by a
teacher-led, student-collaborative discussion of individuals’ experiences with ideas or themes or events
that the text relates. Then, the text is read en groupe, with each class member reading a part aloud and
with occasional stops for discussion, analysis, and prediction of what might happen next. Finally, in the
relationship stage of the course, class participants are invited to relate ideas from the story to their own
lives, past, present, and future. Tinzmann et al. note that, although the ETR may be particularly useful
and effective in cultures with strong oral histories or “talk story” practices such as those of the Hawaiian
Islands, it can prove to be an effective template applicable across the curriculum.
Although the across-the-curriculum applications that have been suggested in the aforementioned
Unesco proposals have tended to the research-oriented transdisciplinary, actively engaging experts in
varying fields of interest to teach a subject matter as it relates to their particular expertise, the twenty-
first-century curriculum that would unite the individualized to the collaborative would take advantage of
a sort of mentor, master of ceremonies, impresario to ensure that neither practical nor theoretical
activities nor participants in them go off the rails; for instance, the mentor in the Hawaiian ETR is
typically a teacher well integrated into both the underlying theory and the realized culture surrounding
the texts being studied.
Conclusions and implications: Innovation
A clear conclusion to be drawn from close readings of various Individual Learning Plans, particularly
those of the Rhode Island schools (cf. RIDE, 2010) alongside curricula that typify the Teaching Europe
system, such as ELICIT and other Unesco-promoted plans, is that, while the ILP may seem effectively
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7. to ascertain subject-matter competency attainment, it remains an American-style system, as Baudry
(2007) might say. That is, the very definition of the ILP depends upon the “field-independent” individual
as a unit; it aims to strengthen self-confidence, self-directedness, and the sort of rugged individualism
that has long defined the indépendantiste American spirit. By contrast, most Unesco-inspired syllabi
exhibit an underlying “field dependence”, in which questions, ideas, projects, and research are done
within a kind of group-induced mental mosaic, in which the topic gains enhanced significance based on
its subject-matter surroundings as well as its social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. Notably,
field-dependent learners realize quickly that, if they are to collaborate, they must attain multifarious new
literacies in areas with which they may not yet be familiar, and they find transdisciplinary input to be
most helpful.
It seems evident that a significant implication to United States educators of analyzing programs of
individualization/customization alongside the notions of collaboration is that the commonly-held notion
of a single literacy must be broadened, if the sort of innovation is to transpire that Pieterse (2007),
among others, has foreseen for the future, in which “the pendulum (is) swinging from unfettered market
forces to growing state coordination, …an era of growing development pluralism, cooperation”. As has
been suggested in Unesco documents, at least four intertwined, pluralistic capacités, or literacies,
should underlie curriculum development, including “ordinary” literacy, or alphabétisme; mathematical
literacy, or numeracy; cultural literacy; and technological literacy. Indeed, as Unesco suggests, all of
these literacies must be seen to have a bearing on all subject matters. Furthermore, as State Library of
Iowa (Usa) documents suggest, the commonly-held belief that any/all literacy rests solely within the
bailiwick of librarians or teachers in remediation has to change. As access to information becomes
faster and easier, and as technological innovation permits greater/easier entrée to ideational
innovation, so must the techniques of evaluation and exploitation of that information be accelerated.
Free information acquisition is becoming, as Perrenoud (1995) suggests, a “right” of the modern,
multiculturally aware citizen.
As Wells and Zolyan (2011) state in their summary of “Challenges of Globalization and Inter-
Culturalisation in Higher Education”, “a policy of incorporating a multicultural approach across academic
curricula” comprises not mere political correctness; rather, it amounts to an exigency. Indeed, recently
suggested changes to the rythme scolaire (literally, “school rhythm”, or educational progress) in France
give evidence of the sorts of social concerns that might well lie beneath the worries of how to set forth
what for academic study anywhere in the modern world. L’Express magazine’s Chevrolet (2013) has
noted that “schools tend to house the canaries in society’s coalmine, where social tensions, if not
crises, can first be seen.” Furthermore, Chevrolet continues, “a proper education in the twenty-first
century must take place in concert; government officials, school administrators, teachers, students, and
engaged business leaders must all have a hand in the planning…” And in a century when the
technological means exist to permit us at once to retain our individual, idiosyncratic learning styles and
to share our ideas collaboratively across what used to be boundaries imposed by time or space, age or
sex or social status, individualization must be married with collaboration for effective innovation to
transpire.
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