Sunday 28 October 2012

Here and There but Nowhere






Picture from a recent school trip. Its symbolism rekindled the awareness of my diasporic identity as a citizen and a teacher. Unfortunately, a third space passport does not exist.


Thursday 26 April 2012

What about the Good Stuff?


The life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" but this does not entail that good things do not happen. However, the worst thing that could happen to us and maybe Hobbes did not anticipate it was the additional time famine from which we are suffering today. I have not blogged for a while; teaching, examining, mentoring, parenting and studying have left me with no time to blog. Not much time to make a note of the good things happening, despite the fact that life IS nasty, brutish and short for a great number, if not all, human beings. It is a sad state of affairs when you do not make a note of the good things. To train myself to do this, i have divided my to-do list in four parts. Important Stuff, Good Stuff, Boring Stuff and Very Boring Stuff. (My friend, LS, suggested we add another section, Daunting Stuff. I am considering collapsing Boring and Very Boring or Important and Good, to allow for a neat division of the page in four parts. I am not sure when i will reach a decision, as i am debating whether the Important Stuff is necessarily Good or the Good Stuff necessarily Important. Issues of definition, perception and experience are standing in the way of groundbreaking developments in the area of to-do-list-making, but Daunting will definitely be there.)

So here is my confession: my Good Stuff list since the last time i blogged. I hope i am forgiven.

1. My Year 1 students had an interactive oral session on Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto that made the room come alive with ideas and possibilities. The concept of the three-star question that i picked up from Erica McWilliam challenged them to higher levels of probing into the text and understanding its ambiguities. LS was there to witness it all and that made the experience even more precious, for the students who felt appreciated and worth observing, and for me, navigating my way in the new course (with so many others in the sidelines of the OCC forum) looking for good practice and improved student performance.

2. My lovely boarding student, S, prefaced this stimulating event with an equally stimulating and very enlightening presentation on Japanese culture. Might i add that she took the time to read the book in both languages before addressing my students? (No category exists for these experiences and the eagerness with which she picked up the phone to call her mother in Japan and ask her to send us a copy of the original).

2. The final draft of the second assignment for the online course was turned in on time. The design of a learning network for IB teachers with a focus on their professional development by creating a learning environment and a learning space for them has been completed. (Surprisingly, despite being famished for time, i did manage to spend a couple of days on JSTOR and other databases researching... ) Yes, the idea of a space where teachers can share what we know, learn more, share ideas, connect ourselves to individuals, professional communities and learning organizations is Good Stuff.

3. Quality time with the librarian=balm for the soul. Our lovely librarian had a little project prepared for World Book Day and i gave her a hand setting it up. (If she were to allow coffee drinking in the library i would seriously consider moving in there.) Her idea brought together book suggestions by members of staff and the outcome was an interesting list of books from around the world, dated from 200BC to 2012, books that can make one cry or laugh, books that have changed our lives. On that day i read an excerpt at school assembly from a book that i had chosen, viz. Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, and our librarian tells me that students did ask her about it later. Several approached me asking for the title and the author again. This is Really Good Stuff.

4. Exams are approaching. We are all in one piece and getting there. This year i find myself in both camps. I will be examining and invigilating, but also sitting exams next month on the same day as our Economics and Biology IB students, in another venue and for another purpose. In solidarity with our IB students who are studying i moved my reading 'corner' outside. Where the sun is shining.

Sunday 11 March 2012

Where do I go?

A former student posted this on facebook with the comment that this is something i could have used in my teaching with her class. No matter what one thinks of the artist or the song, this is one great compliment to receive as a teacher. Thank you, JNM.

Saturday 3 March 2012

The feeling organisation



Until recently, i had the impression that feelings were a kind of taboo in certain contexts of our educational organisations. They probably still are in some cultures or they are mediated by other means of expression.

It was naive to assume that 'professionalism' should exclude feelings and emotions in any human context. In my defense, i was culturally self-conscious and trying to stay on a kind of neutral ground, an emotional Switzerland kind of thing, while i kept feeling more and more frustrated. I was also in denial and contradicted myself when i pondered or discussed issues such as morale and job satisfaction. There is simply no way to explore the depth of these issues in clinical terms of hard science. And yet, some of these aspects of our life seem to observe laws that would appear almost natural in their predictions and results.

I have been disabused of these self-conscious notions and my thinking and feeling have been liberated by the latest session of the online course i am attending. Yes, not only is it legitimate to be talking about the emotional and social intelligence of our leaders, but it is very much part of the agenda. Two comments on this: comment one, it is my understanding that this revelation is recent not only to me, but relatively recent to the field as well. Comment two, could this be an instance of a double-standard? Did we ever question the requirement for emotional and social intelligence on teachers? Did we ever question the role of the educator in nurturing their students' emotional and social intelligence (or whatever we called it in the past, the pre-Goleman days)? There is an oversimplification and, perhaps, some one-sidedness in my loaded comments. The demand for standards, national or international, local and state control of our schools, the focus on qualifications in a competitive world did shift the focus away from 'softer' issues. And i will admit i am glad, no, not glad, HAPPY, that we now giving these 'soft' issues more of our attention. Now i feel HAPPY to admit that i have made an investment in my emotional and social intelligence and that there are values i believe in and hold DEAR to me. Not that anything stopped me before, but now i have the bibliography on my side, not just the staff room griping conversations or the long coffee sessions about frustration and job dissatisfaction.

In the amazing mazes of our virtual library i met Mike Bottery and his writings on trust where i found a lot of my thoughts and feelings articulated; his theories answer a good number of my questions and i feel HOPEFUL. Bottery (2003, 2005) describes seven levels of trust and their significance for educators: 1. calculative trust for newly met individuals, 2. role trust, the assertion by the individual that they can be trusted, since they share the values of the profession, 3. practice trust, where assumptions are dis/confirmed and the trust relationship moves into affective and value areas, 4. identificatory trust, where individuals have known each other for years and mutual unconditional respect is generated, 5. meso trust, connected with the belief in the culture and ethos of the organisation, 6. macro trust on the level where the societal conditions where individuals can trust one another are created and 7. existential (2003)/global (2005) trust, dependent on personal meaning and purpose/global forces.

Mike Bottery is not the only education specialist to research and write about trust and other relevant concepts. There is a long thread of these issues discussed in recent bibliography, for anyone who is interested. And what is more, evidence of the relationship between trust and teacher morale, job satisfaction and academic attainment can be found there.

Why am i blogging about trust? My intention is not to advertise Bottery's work and i do not wish to draw attention to the fact that i am doing an online course. I wish to share my opinion, express my FEELINGS and confirm Bottery's claim that "violations of trust, or reduction in the level of trust, particularly when these are unilaterally initiated, will be hurtful and damaging" (Bottery 2005: 7). School administrators who do not recognize the complexity of trust and do not understand its dynamics, mechanisms and its foundation areas in education will be facing damaging and hurtful results in the organization. And then they will have UNHAPPY teachers. Learning organizations have FEELINGS and VALUES. I know at least this much is true. My students know it too.

Bottery, M. 2005. Trust: its importance for educators. Management in Education. 18: 5, pp 6-10.
Bottery, M. 2003. The Management and Mismanagement of Trust. Educational Management and Administration. 31:3, pp. 245-261.

Tuesday 7 February 2012

What we learn from teaching poetry



My English A Literature students on
their experience teaching poetry:

One needs:
Confidence, Discipline and Engagement

It is important to have:
Interaction with the audience, their involvement
and mutual respect

One has to like poetry

One must be prepared!

One thinks the thoughts of someone else

One must use visuals and have a good understanding
of the poem and background knowledge

Openmindedness is a sine qua non and so is
the ability to accept constructive criticism

Saturday 4 February 2012

Meta-constructive or what's in a word?



(To my good friends, CC and MB, whose wise advice i did not take)


Thursday was my day off. Like every day off, i had great plans to do all kinds of things; catch up with the backlog of the last five years, re-read War and Peace and spend quality time with my significant other. Of course i ended up doing very little catching up or looking into my loving spouse’s eyes , spent a considerable amount of time (objective estimate: 20 min, subjective estimate: an eternity) on annoying and unnecessary email communication on problems that other people had created and were refusing to solve, charged my Kindle (this did not require too much of my time…), did some housekeeping stuff with mp3 recorders and cameras, spent a couple of hours on a task for the online course, but most importantly, I spent quite some time on the phone with my friend LS. Now this is what i call constructive. An interchange/activity centered on involvement, collaboration, consultation. An idea is put forth, someone responds, understanding follows, adjustment of the idea ensues, consideration of different perspectives, implications is introduced and on and on, so one constructs meaning/a new idea/experience/plan et c.; in short the learning cycle of do-learn-review-apply-do is followed. This is constructive, this is learning. But that was Thursday and this is what happens when i talk to LS.


The following day, however, i woke up to a new meaning of the word constructive. It’s like the definition in the dictionary was re-written overnight. On that day constructive meant indiscriminately tolerant, willfully ignorant, placatingly accepting, emotionally bland, and pointlessly questioning. Aber, Hallo! Is this a parallel universe or because of the relativist soup in which we are all swimming and our constant fear of conflict and confrontation, we have redefined constructive as meaning “i will not say anything that may upset you and i will not show my anger although i think that you are the reason for it”. Let me give you an example: you go to a coffee shop and you order a cup of coffee, the waiter takes forever, and when he does come the coffee is cold and the waiter is rude. You are angry and you tell the waiter that he was late, rude, the coffee was cold and that is not acceptable. According to today’s definition, this is not constructive. Why? Because you will not get another cup of coffee. And who cares? Not everything is about getting something. In other words, i need to be ‘constructive’ so i can get what i want or i need to be ‘constructive’ so the waiter will not be upset with me and maybe then i stand a chance of getting some hot coffee on time when i visit the coffee shop again. I need to educate the waiter about his job and the way he should treat customers. But it really does not go like that. I do not want the coffee. Not anymore. I want the waiter to know what his job is and i want him to know that sometimes he can be right and sometimes he can be wrong. I am not in the business of educating the world, I am in the business of educating my students and teaching them to educate themselves, so they will not be slow, rude and inefficient waiters. The rest of us, adults, need to agree on some meanings and live by them and their consequences.


Do I have anything against deconstruction, against the transcendental signified? No, i don’t. But i oppose selective and opportunistic deconstruction. You’re either with Derrida or you’re against him. You cannot say "Oh, it’s Tuesday, it’s my Derrida day of the week" or "I’m in a Derrida frame of mind" or "this creates a Derrida mood" or "this problem is not going away, let’s put some Derrida on it". Sometimes you just have to face the music.




Saturday 14 January 2012

"mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent pour partir"



I return to Baudelaire during critical times. Invariably. He lived in the 19th century.

The first week back from the X-mas break and all my students seem to be charging ahead, in one direction or another, at variable speed most of them and with variable momentum. But there is motion around me. There is feeling and there is a lot of talking, sometimes pointing to "the poverty within" as Pinter would phrase it. This week of my life was, yet again, a week about education.

First, the technology. I recently acquired a kindle, the purchase of which i proudly announced to my father, my model book-worm. Good, he said, another publishing house bites the dust then. But, dad, e-books are cheaper, easier to access, transport, share. I know, he said, but musician so-and-so, whom you like so much, has had only seven performances in December and January. And he does not earn anything in royalties because his music can be downloaded on the internet for free. (Counting the number of trees that i will save by using my kindle was pointless.) I put the phone down and picked up my kindle, went on reading Neil Postman's The End of Education where Postman discusses the gods of Economic Utility, Consumerism and Technology (p. 32): "technological innocence refers not only to ignorance of detergents, drugs, sanitary napkins, cars, salves, and foodstuffs but also to ignorance of technical mechanisms, such as banks and transportation systems". The technological advancement that started with such a bang in the 19th century is continuing and the baton is being passed on to the 21st century. The 20th century, my dad's world, is dead,. I was born and raised in this world; i will die in another. Do i feel the moral imperative to buy a print book for every kindle book i download? Probably. I will try to hold on to my dad and our shared world. (By the way black-and-white is back, but it's not the same. Satyajit Ray is black-and-white, 21st century isn't.)

Putting my personal technological and emotional dilemmas aside, the association of the 19th and the 21st centuries that Postman creates, reminds me of a similar point Erica McWilliam made at IBAEM regional conference in The Hague in October in 2011 with regard to education. Actually it is the very first point she makes referring to the emergence of disciplinary categories in the 19th century ('homo sapiens') and the need for "empathy, global consciousness, thinking beyond own generation, willingness to change and courage" for the new category that describes what humans are, i.e. 'globo sapiens' (a term attributed to Ian Lowe) in the 21st. How much of what we teach our students, in boarding and in the classroom, is still 20th century, or even the 19th? For example, do we still believe that if we throw people together, they will get to know each other and eventually get along? Contact theory does not always seem to work; look at America, look at South Africa or just look at some of our schools. Do we try to create a shared culture in our schools and do we value every stakeholder as a learner? Probably not, many of our processes in schools are managed in an authoritarian, rather than a co-constructivist way. Maybe we need a closer look at the culture in our schools, their structure and how we manage power. Do we lack courage? Are we unwilling to change, or even worse, resist change? My father is not unwilling to change; he is unable to do so. But for me, a teacher, it is important to have a kindle, use a smartboard, web 2.0 and much more. It is a moral imperative to have courage, empathy, the willingness to change and think beyond my generation. Because that's where my students live.

As Erica McWilliam suggests, the 21st century needs more than routine thinking in everything we do and learning matters more than knowing. What is in demand is the ability to see the part in the context of the wider and more complex whole and the ability to collaborate with others in ways that increase opportunities for successful innovation.

This week also, a lot of my students decided to write their ToK essay on the topic of discovering new ways to look at old data vs discovering more new data. The discussion led us to watching Sanjit Bunker Roy's TED talk about his Barefoot College. Illiterate grandmothers who do not speak the same language, working together to build solar panels are quintessentially Globo Sapiens of the 21st century. What are we?