Opening night

Well the students really pulled it off. Over the course of the evening if you include the students, parents, teachers, other invited people and little brothers and sisters there would have easily been 100 people there. Out of 58 students there were 4 who didn't produce anything although two of those were due to sickness and their display would have been great. The diversity of displays was very impressive. Cannibalism, fast food and advertising, religion, histories of food and food related issues, wild foods, battery hens, food chains, food and literature...But I still think next time we could do even better and our team has some ideas about what we can try. If all displays had started from a common, genuinely important question the whole exhibition would have been the workings of a learning collective. Instead we had lots of mini collectives. And the social action component which is so important to social studies and education in general wasn't quite there. The picture on the right serves as a good metaphor for much of education. We look at the world, we don't participate in it. But in order to participate in it well, we can't not engage in long and careful observation. The two go hand in hand and the best education can negotiate the role of observer and actor. Our exhibition informed the public which is a great start. There were a couple of petitions beside the displays and the whole exhibition made $60 in donations for an orphanage the school supports and is sending some senior students to in the holidays.

I also realise how lucky we are at my school. A teacher or teachers who can do what we did tonight at a school like the low decile, low literacy, low parent engagement one I used to work in are the really clever ones. It is easy to forget them in the new curriculum exuberance.