Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Retry
24 May 2004, 3:48 pm
Okay, another attempt at circumventing the name thingie, above. I realise this rather defeats the purpose of removing the link to my on-line journal, but I just don't want to be a duplicator, however unintentionally.I wonder if I can find a natty quote from the original Harvest Bird itself to add to the header? Given that the former is concerned with human destruction during the Sino-Japanese war, any analogy might be unduly taut (or tautologous, no?).
Reversi
24 May 2004, 12:48 pm
In the interests of a more accurate RSS feed, I have, as you can see, flipped the template and reversed it.I have started a roll of teaching blogs (at right), and will continue, most unsystematically, to add to it as I find material that catches my eye.
While browsing Mike Arnzen's site, linked to at right, I thought a part of this entry to be particularly interesting. Arnzen's distinguishes between the defintion made by "an English class in 'Blogs and Wikis' at Bemidji State U" of "'PedaBlogs' as 'Blogs and blogging for teachers by teachers'" and "'edublogs' which are blogs related to education -- or used in education -- in a more general sense". (The quoted material includes some linkage which I haven't reproduced here.)
I think this is a useful distinction to have made. Having set up this site, I found while browsing quite a few blogging communities based around using the blog as a teaching tool, but none dedicated specifically to blogging for and by teachers, which is what this blog is, although its purpose is more personal and reflective than, say, Arnzen's blog.
While the relative prominence of Arnzen's blog makes me think that I shall indeed have to change my name, I like very much the idea of two related fields of pedablogy and edublogging. Rarely are so many interesting ideas bound within a semi-crummy pun!
Buzz
24 May 2004, 12:37 pm
My impression of this film studies unit, which continues apace, is that it has been a huge hit with my students. It's a curious thing, since they've had to work as hard on the technical language as they did during the previous literary studies unit on The Quiet American, but because film is associated in their experience with pleasure (and reading English language novels isn't), these last few weeks have seemed like play, not work.I worried myself into a light stew over the weekend concerning whether they were retaining any of the analysis we'd done or the vocabulary we'd discussed as they went along, but today's review revealed that, not only had they mastered some quite complex ideas, they'd also retained quite a bit of material we'd looked at only in passing.
The question this then raises for me is how the literary study unit might be reconfigured to include at least some of the pleasurable aspects associated with film. Is such a thing possible?
Any of my few readers' thoughts would be most welcome!
Engage!
23 May 2004, 2:34 pm
Exams for the programme of which my prep lit course is a part are happening in two weeks. Before that, a number of major assessments are due across all courses, including a twenty-five percent essay in my paper this Monday week.I gave everyone lots of framing and help for the first essay, running three tutorials on it. Unfortunately, not all students seem to be taking those skills and ideas across to preparation for this coming essay. It was fortunate on Friday that I was too tired to be dismayed by a tutorial of four students, none willing to engage with the material, all sitting with pens poised while they asked me to make pronouncements about it which they then wrote down.
I guess it's because they want to do the best work possible and figure that's going to come from me, not them. But that isn't the point of the course--the point is to get them going in the reflection and engagement that will enable them to form their own ideas about the texts. At the moment, they want me to tell them what to think so that they don't have to.
I think the topic of at least some of tomorrow's lecture will have to be that the secret of success for this coming essay is to
- work out what you have to do to answer your question of choice
- engage with the question and the material in order to formulate your own answer.
and
Twink-Out
23 May 2004, 2:28 pm
Okay, so further to the previous entry, I've removed the permanent link to my other blog. But, you know, I'm a compulsive linker, so all but the most foolish of fools can find their way back if they really want to...Separate
23 May 2004, 2:19 pm
A fellow participant in the on-line teaching discussion forum I belong to mentioned in an email to me the difficulty in separating the different strands of one's bloghood and streamlining access accordingly.This is something I haven't resolved to my satisfaction yet. Obviously, this blog would be an interesting stopping point for fellow teachers, but I'm reluctant to give out its address too freely since nobody likes to feel implicated in someone else's critique.
That's the problem with teaching in general, I think--or maybe just professional life in general. (Since I've worked as naught but a teacher, I can't really comment beyond that sphere.) To get beyond being a tips and techniques monkey, you need to reflect on your practice and your context, and to critique it with a certain unsparing gaze. And there's nothing like one person's unsparing gaze for making enemies of those who formerly thought that one person was nice but harmless.
Erosion
22 May 2004, 4:23 pm
Manon and I were talking the other day about how things change after you've finished studying, once you've gone into the workforce. Both she and I completed postgraduate degreees in English, and both of us went to work for our alma mater (she in PR, I in non-academic teaching). Thinking about this, we were contrasting our idealism aged, say, twenty-three, with our current attitude to life and work, in which the idealism has been rather eroded.When we were twenty-three year old thesis-writing flatmates, our attitude was very much that, if something wasn't much good, it should be changed. Don't like your flat? Move out. Don't like your job? Get another. Don't like your boy/girlfriend? Give 'em their marching orders and bust out on the scene again like Annie Lennox at the end of the "Beethoven" music video.
Study systematises your vision like that, in ways you can't even be aware of, so that the whole of life resembles something of an argument/evidence/conclusion kind of deal. Then you finish your thesis, graduate and, as we both did, experience the drifting misery of being unemployed (in both our cases, for between four and six months). Something about having no money and the grinding difficulty of applying for job after job, some far far away from what we imagined ourselves ever doing (I even considered applying for a position as web designer for the local Chamber of Commerce) rather erodes that linear idealism, and you find yourself very interested in the more compromised world of being able to earn an income. The days of sitting in bars solving other people's problems, borne up on a light and fluffy bed of scholarship funding, seemed painfully recent and painfully inaccessible.
So we got our professional positions and discovered a whole new dystopia of co-workers, employers, muddle-headed thinking and the special nightmare of after-work functions. Both of us spent the first two years in our Good Jobs in a fog of reactive depression (Manon first, and then me, since I graduated three years after her), fleeing the city and even the country as much as we could, and passing many long, dark, tearful nights of the soul wondering at the intellectual property that gave us no protection from workplace bullies. Where was our "if you don't like it, get out" reasoning now?
But at the same time as we went for the long disappointing slide, other things were happening, even more antithetical to our former idealism but sustaining in an unexpected manner. Manon got an assistant, got engaged and started to experience the benefits of contacts made during PR trips overseas. I bought a house, furnished it and became, over three years, the owner of two dogs. We, who had scoffed at possessions, found tranquility in the bourgeois joy of owning our own fridges. Who would have thought that making a salary rather than wages could offset two-hour meetings in which no-one can identify an issue?
All this is to say, once the constraints of study were removed and the shock of the new (and disagreeable) workplace (any workplace) abated, we found the very things we had once spurned, such as perks and possessions, became, if not an end in themselves, then fragments to shore against the intellectual ruin of becoming someone's employee. Away from the glass ceiling postgrads who presume to tell their academic masters what to do invariably bump their heads against, we found we could build small private kingdoms in our own office space. The things in adult life we had separately detested as teenagers, that people can be placated with workplace benefits, that workers will put up with things they don't like in order to get things they do, became reasons for staying in the jobs we've stayed in.
And, things have got better, not only because our attitudes have changed over time. The jobs have changed too; we've developed the competence we developed in our studies in the past. The blazing swords of our idealism have become instead small, subversive fires of resistance, little arsons that we commit in the workplace in order to keep our own mental space and to make what once seemed intolerable not only tolerable but energising. I guess what we're serving up hasn't really changed; it's just that these days we're serving it cold.
Process
22 May 2004, 3:39 pm
A colleague of mine is unhappy with the way one of our courses is proceeding at the moment, in particular the fact that she's feels there's too much content. I was thinking about this yesterday, especially in light of the fact that she's been quoted as saying "content isn't important". The alternative to content, in her mind, is Process, which seems to have been something of a holy grail of secondary education pedagogy in the last decade or two.It's for sure that process--which I understand to be the question of how people learn, including issues such as what is the best way to learn--is a crucial part of the learning experience. One may (perhaps unwisely) assume a certain continuity of process within various cultures, so that a person who is educated in one country's education system can progress from one level of education to another travelling on the wheels of certain assumptions about the best way to teach.
In some cultures, this comes from a notion of students learning by being primed in the receipt of knowledge (various Confucian heritage cultures appear as an example of this to western pedagogical eyes). In others, students are expected to participate more in the construction of their own learning, and, in some subjects, the construction of their own knowledge. (So, for example, students conduct experiments in a western high school science classroom; in an eastern high school classroom they may not.)
It's my impression, based on reading and observation, that almost all English language teaching in the west is based on a process model, whereby students learn by doing certain tasks, by which they develop proficiency in speaking, listening, reading and writing. In fulltime language learning situations, students gain this proficiency through classroom engagement and, outside class time, application of their skills/knowledge, rather than by, for example, spending time memorising long lists of vocabulary or points of grammar.
This system comes under pressure in the Foundation Studies programme in which I teach. For the first time in what may be more than a year of study away from home, students are not exclusively language learners. Instead, English language studies take up only fifty percent of their class time (the rest is academic papers), meaning that the interactive, participatory model is eroded to the extent that students have to learn by memorising certain amounts of work in order to keep up.
New Zealand Studies stands in contrast to this, coming as it does from a university-based tradition, since what learning is more content-based than university learning? Mindful of the large wedges of unmediated content that students are going to encounter the following year, and equally mindful of the fact that they are learning in what is for them a cross-cultural environment (where their culture meets New Zealand's culture), the course attempts an in-classroom synthesis of all these different factors. Students learn to reflect on their experiences outside the classroom here, to reflect on the learning process both at home and here, and, as part of this process, study selected topics in New Zealand's social history, economic history and culture in order to facilitate a deeper understanding of what they are doing here and why things are the way they are. This, we argue, is a necessary complement to the skills-based learning (compromised as it is by timetable constraints) of the English and Study Skills programme.
So what happens if we cut back the content further, or take the attitude my colleague has expressed that "content isn't important; it's process that counts"? One thing is that the process of reflection is compromised: its academic edge is lost in favour of a more generalised introspection. Another is that we become a woollier version of the English language programme, Penfold to its Dangermouse. But the third point that remains in my mind is, if we focus on process alone, whose process is it? It's not the process of the language schools, because none of us are language teachers. It's not the process of undergraduate teaching (which in its unmediated form is rather close to the process of Confucian heritage educational systems, whereby students are prepped like baby-birds for the receipt of mama's [papa's?] knowledge). My hunch is that the "process" being invoked is the process of secondary school teaching, which of course is culturally specific, a closed and, to my suspicious mind, fearfully hegemonic and untethered system.
The trouble with teaching within such a pressurised system as secondary teaching is that its rules aren't transferable: the principles and expedient practicalities of working in that world can't be carried over wholesale to the university, which has its own set of expedient practicalities.
I'd argue that an important principle of university learning, for all its many shortcomings, is that students reflect on content as it is fed to them--and it will be fed, in many vocational degrees, where certain amounts of knowledge simply have to be taken on and understood in order to proceed to the desired destination in the given amount of time. So in order for the reflection that we want to take place in New Zealand Studies to work, there has to be a body of content to reflect on, and it needs to be given at a level approaching what will be experienced next year.
If we give ourselves up to process alone, we will risk not only enabling processes that won't in future be used (since, god knows, the undergraduate lecture ain't much of a caring, sharing, participatory place) but also undermining the foundations on which our course is built.
Even marginal university teachers like us, who don't get paid to do research, need to be engaged in the reflection that makes sense of what we're doing. If we're not constantly trying to expand and deepen our understanding of our practice (and I don't mean in the sense of, that lesson went well/didn't go well), then we're just automatons with a reasonable rate of pay.
Eureka?
18 May 2004, 7:10 pm
I have worked out the html for organising entries into categories, but must now wait until the beginning of next week to build the page, otherwise my few visitors will be taken not to this place of reflection and enlightenment, but an index.
Mind you, it will be a very attractive index, if I've written the code properly...
Draconian
18 May 2004, 5:34 pm
I don't think my prep lit course has an unduly harsh reading requirement, nor am I particularly demanding about preparation for classes.But the way my back row groaned this afternoon, you'd think I'd asked them to read Hansard transcripts, rather than browse old editions of the Listener--which I provided for them.
One even said, "does browse mean just looking at the pictures?" What is up with acting dumber than you are?
My neighbour on the floor put it rather well the other day. He said, there's a thing in our culture that makes it okay to excel, but if there's a risk you'll try and fail, it's better not to try at all.
Which is true enough, but I wish those who weren't trying wouldn't make such a spectacle of it.
Sunshine
18 May 2004, 12:09 pm
The first seven weeks of the arts course are hard on students: they read The Quiet American and learn the language of literary criticism. It's a time when I have to rely on the fact that I'm nice to them to be the main cajoling agent in getting them to do the work.Then we hit the ground running with Film Studies; they can apply the skills they've developed to something that's immediately meaningful for them and the sun comes out.
As I said to them today, if we'd started the year with film studies, everyone would have said, "sweet, this course is about watching movies" and proceeded to do no work.
It's nice to be able to reap the rewards but it makes for a tough first term for all of us.
Nope
18 May 2004, 10:59 am
I've changed my mind--I don't like "New Zealand" sitting under my carefully chosen blog name. I'll just have to trust you to trust me when I say that I came up with it independently of those who came up with it before me.Now I've just got to wait for the trim single shot hazelnut magic to kick in before I go and wrangle some film studies concepts.