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.