Below sounds like the PSA focus on Promotoras…community embedded leaders lacking professional career credentials, but “trainable”. There’s a lot of these people all over the state of NM, and across the country really. One of the core concepts is to enable community of learners, and those who can lead from within the group will be essential for success.
Might go so far as to state that recruiting, training, and deploying this intermediary level of “facilitator/ leader”, from within the target groups ranks, and bringing an immediate capability to lead in that particular subculture, or neighborhood, is KEY to future of OTL. Thus “Train the Trainers” projects.
That plus affordable access, one hastens to add. Yes, this probably means that what used to be called teaching assistants would have greatly increased responsibilities. This would take place within the context of a fully developed DLE. That means it could be done by those less fully trained in academic fields.
Yes, this means teachers would need to transition to a different role as supervisors of a DLE. This would involve “teaching” too, but not dependent on physical location, and maybe spreading out the responsibilities over a larger group of students. Much as a Nurse Practitioner usually is in practice with a doctor, and the doctor then can take on more patients, and personally spends a lot less time with most patients. More of the doctors time would be focused on intractable problems….and the same for teachers.
Some of this is dealing with evolving requirements of learning logistics. Behavioral control online doesn’t involve buildings and police roles as much as f2f schooling does. But it needs leadership that will be accepted fully by the community of learners group. People management can thus be reduced from it’s present primary importance in schools.
Ideally.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Establish-Peer-to-Peer-Learning-Networks-NYTimes.com_.pdf”]Nurse Practioners, like promotoras DLE facilitators, then do not replace Doctors or Teachers, so much as they help them redefine their roles to fit current circumstances and technology.
Will we need fewer of this new kind of teacher? Perhaps. But this is just part of the overall conundrum of where jobs are going to come from as tech continues to gain in productivity and ability to “replace” workers. Most fields of endeavor are facing this, either earlier or later.
My suggestion, and not alone in thinking this way, is that conventional “employment” roles will change to accommodate the new technology, and that we will continue to take on more work of a DIY nature. We’ll transition from the industrial economy based on specialized employment, to less defined, and less well paid, knowledge economy work that we do “for ourselves” and save costs.
Such as being much more involved and responsible for our ongoing education, as well as ongoing healthcare, two huge gigantic ginormous parts of present day US economy, employing many many millions.