Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Smarm
22 September 2004, 9:45 pm
Over on my arts students' blog, someone has left on the guestmap a message which I take to be sarcastic.Its impact was a little tarnished by the fact that, in the phrase "breathtaking prose and scintillating poetry", the latter adjective was spelt "scintiliating".
Unless of course he was referring to his own site, since there's no poetry on ours?
My June students have just begun working on the weblog. Some spent up to twenty minutes designed an entry for the guestmap. It was to their credit, I suppose, that they began their summaries on recent ideas about culture, time and history at all, given the map's plethora of little human icons.
Imbalance
21 September 2004, 10:49 am
An increased number of contact hours, while producing financial rewards, is bedevilling the teaching/thinking/writing balance in my life at the moment, which means fewer blog entries all round, much to my disappointment.Since my job involves teaching only and no research, I effectively do my thinking on the sly. But with the sixteen hours of classes a week I'm engaged in until the end of next month, I'm finding not only that during the day those pockets of time when I could turn reflection into blog posts have largely disappeared, but also that in the evenings--the time when I usually do most of my writing--I'm usually too tired to do much except eat, exercise and sleep.
Needless to say, this is causing me a certain amount of frustration.
I teach, I think, in order that certain other things in my life be brought into focus: to return to current students some of the insight that was gifted to me by a few of my own teachers, to give me food for thought and perhaps most of all because it pays well (at present) and gives me a space within the university where I can have rather more autonomy than I might in other positions. There are other reasons too: because it enables me to live where and as I want, and because I see it as an opportunity to be a positive presence in people's lives, one of the few human interactions in which risk and difficulty is minimised, if it's done with care and attention.
But still, but still, when the rest of me--the thinking, writing me--which is in many ways the core or primary me, has to be put aside in order to attend entirely to the demands of teaching, I feel anxious and resentful, especially of the fact that, in order to avoid this, I have to work part-time (which I'm not doing for the next few months).
And yet, there are still asides that remain, sustaining moments and things to hold on to: the experience of running into several students from last year on separate occasions these last few days, and seeing them well and animated and so pleased to see me.
Even if the things I want for my own day-to-day are stripped out for a while, it's reassuring to see that the things I've tried to bring about for other people are there.
Authori-tah
14 September 2004, 1:42 pm
Via Mr. Teacher, a quiz I've seen around before, inviting the taker to determine their location on the political compass, which augments the traditional left-right horizontal axis of economic theory with an authoritarian-libertarian vertical axis. An example of the usefulness of this is it gives a clearer picture of the ways in which political opposed groups may align as well as differ (see for example this image showing the economic policies of the British National Party well to the left of British New Labour).
While my own rating (Economic Left/Right: -6.00 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.56) puts me most clearly in the left/libertarian regions of the graph-space, it occurs to me that a greater awareness of the way in which my students and I differ on the libertarian/authoritarian axis may go some way towards understanding some of the difficulties involving in orienting students from some eastern cultures into western universities. So much of what we do here comes from what might be understood as a libertarian epistemology, whereas the Confucian Heritage Tradition of education can be seen as strongly authoritarian.
My New Zealand Studies students understand this difference by other names, of course. They just don't like it.
NZS5
14 September 2004, 1:21 pm
Although the next few weeks are going to be crazy-busy, I'm enjoying the fact that I've got four quite different groups of students--one local, three international--which means that my own reflection about what's going on will have some variety.I've been thinking about the fact that some students in New Zealand Studies face a double-whammy in terms of barriers to their learning, and that navigating around this requires some delicacy and tact (and occasional bursts of fearsome determination in the classroom). The NZS class I am currently responsible for is made up, except for two students, of young people from mainland China, and the whole class is taking commerce as their elective pathway into university.
It's been my experience in teaching this subject that commerce students are particularly resistant to the subject matter, rejecting the idea of the importance of understanding their new cultural and learning context or even of practising their study skills in favour of sticking to more prescriptive views of knowledge: they need, they believe, to learn how to run a business. That is all. It is particularly challenging to lead them to a sense of commonalities between different subject areas (such as commerce and humanities), not because these subject areas necessarily have nothing in common, but because the students perceive that this is how it is.
It's a slightly more polite version of the sixth form maths classes in which my own classmates would demand, "how is this going to help me get a job?" everytime some point of calculus was introduced. But these students are not sixteen.
The other resistance arises out of students being all of a single culture and language group (allowing for the fact that being away from home tends to erase the internal differences that are a feature of any national culture, excepting the two students of mine two years ago who spent the whole year arguing on the subject of which is better, Nanjing or Shanghai). Maintaining English in the classroom is hard, since students have little reason to use it when there are only two people--a Korean student and the teacher--who don't speak Chinese as a first language. (The Korean student's participation is facilitated by the fact he has a Chinese girlfriend). Combine this with the fact that I am teaching them about the culture in which I live, and classrooms can feel like a mini-battleground: New Zealand versus China. Which of course is not the point of the course at all.
The consequences of this are seen in all kinds of ways. In an exercise looking at the harsh workplace conditions of the 1880s, including some material on child labour, the question was asked, "would you rather have been a child in New Zealand at this time or now? Give reasons for your answer". One student simply wrote, "No. Because I like my own country".
The difficulty is of course the outlying reality, the fact that this is not their own country or (yet) their own university, and that what they see as, at worst, an unwanted disciplinary and cultural initiation is in fact an enabling pathway to the things they want: successful university study at an English language university, in New Zealand.
It can be hard to facilitate that with the inadvertant limitations I've described.
Hooker-tastic
10 September 2004, 5:11 pm
Hooker-tasticWhen you are teaching units in early Maori-European contact, western-martial arts hybrids in film and modernist art, you end up mentioning prostitutes a lot.
I don't even know anyone who works in a brothel, but I sure know something about their social history in this country, their representation in recent mainstream film and their presence in proto- and post-impressionist art.
In With the New
06 September 2004, 2:52 pm
I haven't updated for a week or more due to some downtime because of ill-health; it made keeping three blogs on the go too much of a task!However, a lot has been happening student-wise and I hope to reflect and report on it more regularly from now on.
At present I am split four ways in my teaching, which suits me rather well. I have one group of international students in week twenty of a twenty-eight week arts course; we are about to fly headlong into a unit on twentieth-century art in the west. A second arts group has just finished a film studies unit and is about to begin week thirteen of twenty-eight. My New Zealand Studies group is the same amount through their course, last seen looking at the allies in World War Two, and today began a new intake of local students in their preparatory programme. I am involved with a study skills course for them.
I volunteered to take the first lecture in this course, and was pleased enough with what I came up with. As a group the students seemed focused listeners, but the proof of that will be in the tutorials (of which there are three to every lecture).