Reflection: How did I get here?

My mother was a secondary teacher, so one of the things I always promised myself growing up was that I'd never be one myself... which is a shame, because I L-O-V-E teaching, I just couldn't stand be a school teacher (!) I love learning new stuff, finding things out I didn't know before, testing my understanding and my thoughts against what other people know, and I love helping other people to discover the thrill of doing that.

Somehow though, that's not what school-teaching is all about. ECE, postgrad, workplace, anywhere else is fine - but schools and undergraduate university study are generally not. *sigh.*

When I left university with an Honours degree in economics I had had enough of formal study & promised myself I wouldn't ever go back. (It was a mediocre degree, university didn't engage or challenge me any more than school had. I've always regarded it as a double major - in Economics and Nightclubbing. As a consequence, the result didn't do me or the university in question much credit really. )

The thing that drove me back to education was having kids. In New Zealand we have a wonderful co-operative Early Childhood organisation called Playcentre (one word) where parents train to work as ECE 'teachers' learning child development, observation skills the ECE curriculum etc alongside their children. You get a very different perspective learning ECE pedagogy to support your own child and your friends' and neighbours' children from what you might otherwise. It can't help but be learner-centred. (Besides which, working in ECE settings is like herding cats - first of all you have to figure out where they want to go, then you work with that.... otherwise you're sunk!)

Once my kids had both gone to school I worked for about 5 years doing project management of course materials in a distance education institution, and as part of my PD there I began studying online in the University of Southern Queensland's M.Ed programme.

Postgrad rocks! You're allowed to have an opinion again - and to question and challenge and THINK FOR YOURSELF! I don't think it was just that I had learned by then to work to my own satisfaction, rather than anyone else's (although that was part of it), a big part of it I am sure was a difference in attitude on the part of the course leaders from what I had experienced in formal education anywhere before.  I loved it! Haven't finished my M.Ed yet, but I will (one day)...

The feral learning idea grew out of an assignment I did for a paper in Instructional Design. I once heard Marc Prensky quote his game designers as saying "You give an idea to an instructional designer and they'll suck all the fun out of it..." Frankly, I think they have a point - and not just instructional designers, professional educators across the board tend to fall into the same trap. And you know, none of those andragogy, pedagog or other-gogies actually describe how I learn, although Jack Mezirow's transformative learning is close (although he doesn't understand kids), and so is Linda Silverman's visual-spatial model. Why on earth not?

I was very fortunate to find myself participating in a group at CABWEB with Jan Visser of the Learning Development Institute (LDI), who was editing a book, "Learners in a Changing Learning Environment". Jan invited me to submit a chapter on feral learning (which I'd been holding forth on at some length) - so the ideas got formalised and incorporated into the book... which I'm very proud of.

So here I am... in a bit of a hiatus at the moment because Real Life has taken over again for a while - and developing my own PLN through interesting sites like Change the Schools,  Edutopia,  AERO,  Shifting Thinking and the like.

I wonder what's around the next corner?

Thinking about change: Becoming a more fully functioning person

The "thinking tools" Jennifer Garvey-Berger introduced us to at the Shifting Thinking conference were familiar in some respects, but different enough to offer some new and interesting ways of looking at the process of learning as transformative change  (Mezirow, Senge).

Anyone who starts their presentation with some great poets and philosophers is on the right track for me.  Jennifer used a Rilke quote to kick off her first presentation.  I didn't make a note of it but I'm hoping it will be up on the conference website soon because it seemed to capture the spirit of transformative learning and learning as personal growth (Rogers). I'm sure I've dealt with that in other posts in my other blog but I can't for the moment find it - harrumph. However, the idea is captured in this quote from The Good Life and the Fully Functioning Person (1953) which you can find quoted online here.

The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction not a destination.
The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.
This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals.
The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality. ....

Rogers identifies the characteristics of this process as  

1. An increasing Openness to Experience ...a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings
2. Increasingly Existential Living ...an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment. ...the self and personality emerge from experience rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit pre-conceived self-structure... [so that]... one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it.
3. An increasing trust in his Organism ...as a means of arriving at the most satisfying behavior in each existential situation. 

His conclusion is that "It appears that the person who is psychologically free moves in the direction of becoming a more fully functioning person." That, I believe is the touchstone for effective pedagogy (and in fact all successful human relationships) - to conduct ourselves ina a way that contributes to the other party (in this case the learner, and since teaching is transactional, ourselves as well) becoming a more fully functioning person. 


This is in fact closely echoed by the National Education Goals (NEGs) that govern New Zealand's education system, which specify

Goal 1: The highest standards of achievement, through programmes which enable all students to realise their full potential as individuals, and to develop the values needed to become full members of New Zealand's society.

The Shifting Thinking Conference

First, let me acknowledge that I love conferences! I love the luxury of having days set aside just to mingle with other people with similar interests; the stimulation of being exposed to different expertise, different environments, different world views, different experiences; the discussions; the sense of new possibilities and perspectives; and the revelation that there are so many other people in the world who care about the things I do.

Shifting Thinking was like that, and with the extra bonus of being a bit outside the square. I came away at the end of the two days feeling a bit excited about the conversations we had begun, and a bit unsettled by some of them, a bit frusrated about the sessions I didn't get to.

The best of it
The Day 1 highlights for me were Jennifer Garvey-Berger's conversations about the nature of change and the four thinking tools she introduced us to.

The Day 2 highlights for me were Perry Rush's session, called "Who says schools have to look the way they do?"  and the group session with parents from local schools, called "Who are the experts?" (I'm glad I read the synopsis, because the title almost put me off.) As it turned out, two of the people presenting this session had children in the same class as my youngest,  so we had a considerable amount of shared experience to draw on.

And in between, no less exciting was the opportunity to visit Te Papa Tongarewa's new interactive Our Space with Diana-Grace Morris, to explore the interactive map, an interactive multimedia feature called simply "The Wall" and the High Ride.  It was great to see our little group of middle aged respectable educators (me included) squealing like kids with the excitement of exploring and creating. Woo-hoo!

The whole conference had a real buzz to it, with an exciting combination of willingness to challenge existing mindsets and positive attitude.

And the rest
The only exception was the second speaker on Day2, Cathy Wylie who didn't really seem to get the point of the event. Where other speakers used the opportunity to reflect on their own professional and personal journey, on tools for creating collaboration and positive change, and on mapping out the way forward into the 21st century, Wylie gave a muddled, negative and inaccurate address that added nothing of value. She'd obviously not prepared properly and seemed to have only covered about half of her material, so maybe the good stuff was yet to come. Although she's positioned herself over the past 20 years as an expert on the New Zealand version of school self-management and community ownership, Wylie really doesn't ever seem to have got the point of the reforms, and this address bore that out, with inaccuracies of fact, and very little evidence of analytical insight or fresh or original thinking.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always had
The lesson I suppose is that we all have to work with what we've got - and shifting the mindset of the system as a whole will need us to engage a large number of practitioners in all kinds of roles who don't understand, or don't have the energy or the insight to look beyond what they have always had. So part of the challenge will be how to re-frame those people and those characteristics in our own attitudes and practice that are currently "part of the problem" in ways that allow them to become "part of the solution".

So how do we learn to stop doing what we've always done, in search of what we've never had? It's not easy. Perhaps the first step is to practice stepping out of the comfort zone and doing things differently. This is one of the things Jennifer Garvey-Berger challenged us to think about - but that might be a separate post.

It's a "clumpy universe"

One of the triggers for my return to the blogosphere  was attending the Shifting Thinking conference organised by NZCER last week. It was a really stimulating event - which I intend to reflect on in future posts - and turned out to be one of a series of events that have brought me to this point. Participants at the conference were actively encouraged to respond to the conference procedings via tweets and /or blogs. Not having an active blog to post to became a problem. Twitter is great, but there are some things you just can't cover in 140 characters.

To cut a long and twisty story short, a number of factors have converged (as they do) to motivate me to make the change and get blogging again. Hence the refernce to the clumpy universe. Just as matter (stuff) is not evenly distributed throughout the universe but forms clumps within the larger emptiness, so things are not regularly distributed throughout my life. When enough things converge, it forms a node that changes the surrounding environment. Feral learning (life!) is like that too, uneven and clumpy. In this case, the clumpy universe drives me back to blogging.

So - here we go: housework done (sort of); groceries bought and put away (mostly); brain engaged (more or less); and a bit of spare time to blog in (not really). Why do I bother to mention those things? Because my life is multi-dimensional. Things that happen in one arena carry over to influence what happens (or doesn't happen) in another. And now that I've got everything ready, I'm out of time and going to bed.