New Zealand Keynote: Russell Burt – ‘ReTooling School’

Wednesday 10 July, 8.50am – Auditorium
Collaborative Notes: New Zealand Keynote Address – Russell Burt, Principal, Pt England School

“How do we ReTool school to make it engaging, empowering and success making for all? At the same time how do we guarantee equity and access so that what our government calls “priority learners”, have the same opportunities for 3^rd millenium citizenship as everybody else?

“When vast tracts of what is now the Developed World, were opened up by the provision of roads, bridges and railroads, people moved from subsistence and achieved effective citizenship, locally, nationally and globally. The infrastructure that enables access to the new platform for citizenship, the internet, is analagous to the roads, bridges and railroads of yesteryear. The business of retooling requires this infrastructure as a baseline, but real efficacy and agency will only be achieved when environments are enriched by innovation on top of the essential infrastructure.

“Retooling School requires a Change Pedagogy Imperative:

“When essential aspects of learning are amalgamated and new media are used for the reception and delivery modes, the learner experience is completely different. It is more than possible to develop new learner agency, efficacy and leadership in learning. This journey to genuine citizenship will have three major hallmarks:

• ubiquity – anywhere, anytime, any pace, any people learning
• agency – the power to act -informed/empowered/enabled learners
• connectedness – edgeless education, connected minds

“We need to: Provide the essential infrastructure and enrich the environment for local, national and international citizenship of all learners.”

Keynote speaker – Russell Burt

Russell is principal of Pt England School, in Tamaki having worked there since 1991. Prior to that, he and Dorothy worked in schools in Papua New Guinea, came home and worked in Otara, before settling in Tamaki at the beginning of 1991.

Russell’s adult life has been spent working with Maori and Pasifika children and families through school and community.

Russell has worked with the Ministry of Education to assist with the provision of quality staff for NZ schools and in the development of schooling improvement for low decile schools as well as working with eLearning development from the mid 90’s.

Pt England School has a reputation for innovative development of Literacy with eLearning and for raising achievement outcomes for Maori & Pasifika learners

As principal of Pt England School which has been the lead school of a number of schooling clusters over time, Russell has a convening role in the Manaiakalani Schools Cluster which is committed to growing digital citizenship for children in the Tamaki Community.

In this role he has worked to develop a new kind of community, commercial, philanthropic, government and NGO partnership to help resource the delivery of high quality education in this decile 1A community.

Russell is a long term member of the Pt England Community and is involved in other community capacity building activities through community organisations outside of school. He has been an educator for 34 years.