My schooling and the KC's

Thinking back over 5 years of schooling (four in New Zealand and 1 in Germany) it seems strange that I remember so little. It wasn't that long ago either. It was only last year I could finally say I was a decade older than my oldest students. What I do remember is almost exclusively project based work where there was an element of choice and creativity. This is all I can remember clearly from my schooling:

• A 6th form English project on World War 1 poetry
• A 6th form biographical speech of a family member
• A 6th form Chemistry project where we tested the chlorine levels in local swimming pools
• A 5th form speech where I talked about my childhood hero, Tintin and the history behind the stories and author.
• A 5th form "shaping activity" based on a futuristic book about a segregated society
• My 5th form workshop technology projects
• A 4th form story board about the life of the Mayans
• A 4th form book we read called Winter of Fire by Sheryll Jordan, also about themes of oppression and segregation.
• A standard 3 project on chocolate
  

And that is it. Each activity I really enjoyed and I want to write about a couple of them which I could have enjoyed a whole lot more had my school had a programme of curriculum integration and a sophisticated understanding of the key competencies (not that anyone was talking about these between 1994-1998). I should also add that all of these are essentially individual projects. Not once did I ever feel a part of a collective decision-making body working on a project of any real life significance. This is not to blame my teachers. On reflection, I was extremely lucky with almost all of them. But I don't think it would have taken a herculean effort to have taken what individual teachers were doing in isolation, put it together, and for some pretty incredible and unpredictable learning occasions to have emerged.

The first English project on my list involved us reading some World War 1 poetry. I can't remember what we did in class time but Wilfred Owen's words certainly captured my attention. For the project we had to do I photocopied a whole lot of WW1 images of death and destruction and glued them on to a piece of A2. At the time I was very interested in photography so I went to the local WWII gun emplacements and did a self portrait of me lying dead with the concrete backdrop and developed the photo in my darkroom (yes, this was an anachronism now that I think about it). This photo was enlarged and glued onto the middle of the A2 piece of paper. A line from Owen's poem which I think was "The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori" was glued over all this and coloured in red. Anyway, the teacher liked it so much she bought it from me! It was only a couple of years ago I met her again and she still has it. So, how could a programme of curriculum integration and an understanding of the key competencies have made this even better?

If this had been a block course of a term, or at minimum a "three day episode" like Alfreston College,the opportunities would have been significantly better for me. Imagine if the English teacher did what she did. The history teacher taught us all about the horrors of WW1 and reasons for this war but also the changing nature of war in general. Somebody qualified, perhaps the English and History teachers could have both talked to us about contemporary issues of conflict (the Rwandan massacre had occurred only 3 years earlier and the Bosnian massacre would happen the year after) and perhaps got a guest speaker in. Then the English and History and Art teachers could have got together to organise a community hall to put on an Art exhibition about "the nature of war". The poster I made would have fit in here perfectly. The teachers would have had to really make us see why the nature of war is important to know about and we couod have been required to do some good research before producing a piece of art.

But I wonder if this would have been enough considering my last blog entry on our year 10 food exhibition. We could also have taken a stand on a conflict, and petitioned the government or United Nations. Perhaps that kind of thing would be even easier to do today with our technology. I think I would have remembered a lot more had something like this occurred.

The other instance of learning I remember was the chemistry project involving the collection of chlorine from different swimming pools. If we are to take the KC "participating and contributing" and really apply it to education the biggest question I have for this project is "so what?!". Who cares about the chlorine levels in swimming pools? It was "interactive" education for its own sake. Recently I have really started to notice the complete arcane nature of much of what goes on in schools. Which is a shame because all you need to do is connect a few subjects and philosophies together for some amazing things to occur. Even the arcane stuff can end up having considerable importance. If we were interested in water perhaps we should have been doing an integrated unit on water and looking at the quality of water ways and the social, historical and economic reasons for their degradation. Chemistry theory for chemistry's sake was a complete waste of my time. What's scary, is that I am probably wasting the time of a lot of my students. And time is short. There are too many real world problems, especially ecological ones that need the wisdom of our disciplines. Instead we waste time learning in reductionist, behaviourist, disconnected, and worst of all, dehumanising ways about nothing that really matters on its own.

Year 10 food exhibition

Later this week our year 10 students are putting on their exhibition. Most have some good ideas and most have worked really hard on it. I am worried that we have let them down a bit though. The exhibition isn't based on any kind of real world problem. Individual displays might be but the exhibition isn't really encouraging a "community of learners" across the whole class. The name of the exhibition is "Eat me! The controversy of food" which the students came up with. They have had to define an area using the context of food and develop some questions which their display answers, and which fits into the title of the exhibition. But it will mostly be a collection of individual or group displays rather than a collective attempt to try and inform visitors about a genuine real life problem.

This came to my attention with one particular student who chose to do religion and food. She has done some fantastic research on three world religions and shown what their beliefs are about certain foods. But there was a real element of So What? With her topic. She said that what seemed to pull all of them together was that the reason they didn't eat certain foods was because of beliefs of compassion and mutual respect. Taking this idea we talked about the heading for her display being "Is religion all bad?" laid over a whole bunch of photographs of religious conflict. She will have an opening statement explaining that in fact religions also promote peace and her way of doing that will be through their beliefs about food.

My worry is that we have let her and others down a bit. The "food" part is in one sense too restricting and in another sense allowing too many tangent exhibition displays that are not about real world issues. It is that old complexity thinking concept of "enabling constraints" again. We didn't quite hit it. What we need to do next time is decide from the beginning what the real world question is. Teachers use their subjects as vehicles for exploring, developing, engaging with that question some more. Then students brainnstorm what action they could take to solve that problem at a level manageable to them. The exhibition, then, is not the purpose or final product of the unit. It is a by product, an opportuinty for students to celebrate and share with their parents about their learning and how they attempted to solve a piece of the problem. This attempt to solve the problem is the more important part. That is when they are Participating and Contributing as the key competencies call for.

Anyway, I'm sure they will come up with something great on Thursday, notwithstanding the limitations I am afraid we have imposed on them. But next time it will be even better.

Integrated "food" project Week 5

It is now week 5 of term 1 and we have started the inquiry part of the food project. So far all 4 core teachers have used food as a common theme and taught their curriculum objectives from this context. I chose the level 5 social studies AO "Understand how economic decisions affect people, communities and nations". It is a great AO with lots of scope for problematizing the context of "food". The focus has mainly been on the decision to industrialise our food supply and the consequent effects. So we have looked at the relationship between the oil economy and oil products such as fertiliser on agriculture and watched the 30min doco "The power of community: How Cuba survived peak oil". This got them thinking a bit and we did a creative writing exercise just before watching the doco which I'll write about sometime. We have also looked at Free Trade and the Global Food Crisis and have touched on concepts like globalisation. Not the best concept to "touch on" really. I can't help thinking it is a concept that would make a great simulation game similar to Michael Wersch's example if you had the knowledge.

I started using the social studies social enquiry booklet and I must go back to it. The idea was to find out what they knew and give them some new information which hopefully they would find interesting and which they might build an inquiry around. A good idea in theory but the risk is that up until they actually start the inquiry, the teaching reverts to the banking metaphor of education. Closer attention to the social studies social enquiry model may help prevent this. It hasn't been too bad but I am very glad they can finally start their community exhibition display, which many have been jumping out of their skins to do. Their ideas are incredibly diverse and interesting but they find it very hard to turn an "issue" into a manageable research project.

Next week we will try and take them to Te Papa to critically appraise what is in an exhibition and what makes it successful. Then they can start to think more carefully about their display. The exhibition side of things is going to be very interesting. They have had to come up with a title of the exhibition which is still to be finalised and ideally all displays will reflect that title. Meanwhile, we have timetabled the next 2 weeks a bit differently. They have about 7 hours a week to work on their inquiry and I have 1 social studies period week to do whatever: keep teaching my AO, do some skills-based stuff that crops up from their research, or anything else I can think of. Despite "losing" three periods a week, it doesn't matter. They are utilising all different aspects of the key competencies. Having said this though, I don't see why all their displays shouldn't have a social studies component. Is it worth doing something in public education that isn't socially relevant and involves students participating as critically minded citizens? I think that is why schools exist. If a student has an obsession with butterflies, great. Read about them at home and develop a hobby. If students are to work together as a "community of learners", the butterflies need a social reason to be studied.