As I write this morning I am thinking about what a remarkable week it has been. Life outside-of-uni has been especially stimulating, as has life-within uni.
"Reading", "literacy", "meaning", and "comprehension" are just a few of the words that have been circling my mind like fish in a large aquarium; around and around, occasionally breaking some proximity barrier and in doing so creating new connections. My post for this week is a little disjointed, as it is an amalgam of three separate posts made earlier in the week, with a little added commentary along the way.
Part 1: Response to Tovani, chapters 2 and 3
Despite the title, I’d actually like to make a couple of points about chapter 1 as well, for I think between the lines are some important issues that affect the teacher-student-classroom-school dynamic. Tovani states “the course is a graduation requirement” (p. 1) and goes on to mention that the students taking the course are unlikely to go onto college. This raises an issue of student motivation, and the perceived instrumentality or utility of the course. The students are compelled to be there (in order to graduate), but their reasons may range from “I just want to pass” through to “this stuff is fantastic”. The individual teacher should bear this in mind, for engaging such a wide range of views is no mean feat.
For Tovani the biology text was hard to read and boring. After being sneezed upon, her view of the text changed. It had become meaningful and relevant (my emphasis). These are key concepts in adult education, but they need not be restricted to the post-school domain. As students get older they are more and more inclined to ask “Who cares? How does this stupid chapter affect my life?” By making the activities of the classroom authentically meaningful and relevant one can affect the utility of the work as perceived by the student and thus possibly avoid this question arising.
Something implicit in Tovani’s writing (perhaps she states it formally later in the book) is metacognition on the part of the teacher. She is continually thinking about what she does, why she does it, and how she’ll do it; what effect it may have; what problems may arise. As teachers we must continually think about our own thinking and where it may lead us.
Finally (for chapter 1), the issue of working across departments or faculties is raised. By and large (and I’ll give a dollar to anyone who can tell me the origin of that statement), and this is a broad generalization, high-school (and in the ACT colleges too) departments may as well exist on different planets. This could be simply a matter of perception (I’m often the first person to go wandering the corridors asking which area people teach in and what they’re teaching) but I don’t think so. It is particularly true of maths and science, and even within maths departments there are schisms (look up “maths wars” on google). As one of my lecturers said to me in my first year at uni “the people who blaze new trails, and get all the fame and glory, are those who take apparently disparate fields and look for ways to draw from both”.
Chapter 2
Not a lot sprang to mind as I read chapter two; it all seemed quite self-evident, no doubt a consequence of my having been involved with education for nearly all of my working life. However the responses of the students to the essay (“Salvador, Late or Early”) brought to mind textual ideas of Foucault and Derrida, that what the author intends is not necessarily what the reader perceives.
Tovani asks guiding questions to get the students moving beyond the banal and simplistic, but herein too lays another slippery point: the guiding questions presuppose a certain interpretation of the text on the part of the teacher. This is unavoidable; we all have beliefs (see Peirce “The Fixation of Belief”, especially the first few sections), but do we insist upon transmitting only the canonical view to the next generation? I think not. The “good” teacher will not be distracted by non-canonical views, but rather will consider it on its merits, and perhaps even take advantage of it as a teachable moment.
I would like to further illustrate this point with an example from my own schooling. In Year 11 we studied the film “Ordinary People”. We were asked to raise and discuss points which we felt indicated a pre-existing underlying tension within the family. Someone in the class raised a point, one with which I agreed whole-heartedly, only to have it dismissed by the teacher with words along the lines of “I see no issue with that”. I did see an issue, for I could strongly identify with the young man in the film. Who knows how history would’ve panned out had the teacher asked the student to explain why he felt it was a significant point in the film?
More subtly, I think there is an underlying Socratic/Platonic element (“Meno”) to her approach. Tovani’s guiding questions are drawing out knowledge that was either already there, or causing new connections to be made from pre-existing knowledge. I feel that this highlights the importance of choosing appropriate level texts. What is appropriate? I like Vygotsky’s model (ZPD). Too easy or too hard will result in nothing happening, but a text that is in the zone of proximal development (either in terms of content difficulty or the level to which it is analysed) will allow students to use existing knowledge structures to form new connections.
Chapter 3
The “schemata/blueprint” incident is significant, highlighting the nature of representations, signs and signifiers, and the signified. Language is a way of communicating ideas, and the combinations of 26 letters that most of us use is only one way of getting the message across. I work with builders and engineers, and have spent many a late night preparing technical workshop drawings of one-off parts to maintain the only significant noble-gas mass spectrometer in the Southern Hemisphere (in fact there are only two significant ones on the planet). A lot is communicated by way of drawings. Technical drawing has its own syntax and grammar; in fact there is an Australian Standard covering just that. Builders work with The Timber Framing Code of Australia, a very voluminous document filled with cryptic graphs, tables, and diagrams. Given this background I think the Darvin quote (p.25) about vocational teachers (and quite often vocational students, especially folk who have been in the workforce for a little while) is extremely accurate.
I can personally relate to the comment about science and maths students simply leaping into a question without pausing to read anything. The reason I think this happens is two-fold:
Maths teachers rarely model (“think aloud”; interesting to see that this very common term has been appropriated by an author (Davey, 1983)) to their students how they themselves solve a problem. They just leap in and do it. What do you expect students of maths and science to do if that’s the only way they’ve seen it done!?
Students and teachers tend to associate reading and writing with English only. When they leave the classroom the reading/writing door of their brain slams shut. The same is true for other disciplines, hence, as stated before, my strong opinion that across-the-curriculum collaboration is essential.
Finally, a tempered word of encouragement (not from chapters 1, 2, or 3): all teachers mean well. No one purposefully sets out to harm their students. Some teachers even go as far as trying to put themselves in their students’ shoes. Unfortunately, of those few who try, most end up trying on a very generic pair of shoes. If you have the energy, try to get into each student’s shoes.
Part 2: Prof. Lowe's Workshop/Seminar/Turorial/Inspiration
Perhaps one of the most empowering moments of my professional teaching life. Whilst not in any way trying to shine the light on myself, it occurred to me in 2001 that there was a disparity between what my students could do in maths and what they actually understood. Interviews (written and oral) suggested they didn't unuderstand too much at all, yet many achieved good grades. This was perplexing; clearly the students had developed survival or coping strategies.
Prof Lowe's work has for me taken my tiny gut feeling and shown it to be the case, and, to top it off, has provided strategies that benefit the entire class.
I work mainly with adults who have already formed beliefs and opinions; who have had copious quantities of information pumped into their heads; who can recite chapter and verse huge swathes of maths and physics. When I ask them what certain things meant they are foetn completely stumped. Herein is one of the beauties of working with adults: meta-learning. This is what Prof. Lowe did with us.
Today I used vaious ideas from physics to allow students to gauge (at first I typed guage, but it didn't look right.....) their own level of understanding and comprehension. It wasn't particularly high, but I assured them that based on my own teaching/educating beliefs, coupled with the astounding work of Prof Lowe, I would not actually teach them much new content but would certainly help them understand what had already been injected into their brains.
Beautiful. Prof Lowe's seminar, and a couple of conversations with fellow students afterwards, made Wednesday the 29th of July 2009 one of the most joyful days of my life.
Marrying Wendy will never be knocked from the top of the joyful list!
I made a post to a STS (Science) forum which is also relevant here, about representation, signs, and meaning. There is a "warm" debate taking place in that class between a quite "traditional" physical scientist, and a rather iconclasctic physical scientist (have I mentioned that by training I'm a condensed-matter mathematical physicist....) Here're a a couple of posts:
(Andrew) Just to start things off, I would like to comment on the way you (Jim) quietly referred to language, insisting that in the first instance we should be using words and terms that are familiar to the student. I think this point should be stressed in every class. Specialised language excludes, and we as experts in our particular fields use specialised language without a second though; we know (or at least have a belief or an absence of doubt) what it means. I have three theories about why technical/specialised language exists: (a) to keep undesirables out of the club, (b) because they (generally) score more points at Scrabble, and (c) why use a bunch of simple words when one obscure word will do. The key to the last point is that "bunch" may mean three or four simple words or as many as three or four typed A4 pages. The technical language is a code, and Year 7-10 students are usually encountering the code for the first time.
We (not just as experts or teachers, but often as adults) underestimate how much specialised knowledge we have accumulated, and overestimate the ability of others to quickly assimilate it.
While this doesn't specifically address the question Jim has posed, it is a hobby-horse of mine: language, representations, signs, and the signified.
On another note, while I'm a condensed-matter mathematical-physicist by training, I was compelled (along with all other first year undergrads at Griffith Uni) to study copious quantities of chemistry and biology, including a lot of genetics. Over the past week I have experienced quite often the pleasant sensation of bits of old genetics knowledge floating to the surface of my brain.
(Student X) Just to play devils advocate: specialist language is used because it is precise and carries a lot of meaning. Are you not excluding students from the club by not teaching them the language of science? Or are you advocating that all scientists stop using technical terms and instead write a page when a word will do? My 18 month old twins are learning to talk, and can point at many of their body parts when asked and name some of them. Current parenting guides advocate using correct names instead of made up euphemisms, and I agree. Babies don't learn to talk by people going "goo goo goo" at them all the time. There has to be a point where we use the correct words. Are you really doing students a favour by avoiding particular words, like a mother teaching "pee-pee" instead of penis?
(Andrew) This could get very interesting. "Pee-pee" instead of "penis" is a matter of ostensive definition, that is, pointing out by example. What I'm pointing to is the specialised language that has evolved in all fields, which carry with them deeper meaning, and issues surrounding teaching them. For example, "theft" and "embezzlement" are very well-defined legal terms, but may be quite difficult to explain to the point of reaching understanding to a group of Year 7s, a group whose vocabulary and life experience may not provide sufficient background for them to assimilate the new information and hence allow them to meaningfully use the specialised terms.
The English language has no word for "the smell after rain", but if we were to invent one it would useless to students until we had spoken in terms of "the smell after rain". Then, when the scene is set, we use our specialist term.
Specialist language is a code or cue. It is text that only has meaning within a context. Then there are really interesting words like "Force". What if the world had not been so smitten by Newton and preferred the philosophy of Mach?
Of course we must teach the language of science. But the language of science can only be introduced via the student's existing vocabulary and knowledge. I think we are doing students a favour by avoiding technical terms until they are ready for them.
Part 3: The Rubrics
I wrote a couple of posts through the week about rubrics, one in response to the actual tutorial "question", and a second in response to a fellow student, whose questions seemed to echo and underlying feeling that "rubric" really no more than some new fancy word for the so-call old-fashioned "assessment grid". The "rubric/assessment grid" conversation is a very good example of the representation and meaning aspect of language.
Repsonse 1: To the tutorial "question"
Very interesting Steve, for you seem to have incoporated elements of both an analytical rubric and an holistic rubric, the former in the layout, the latter in the very descriptive (rather than prescriptive) language used.
I introduced an holistic rubric into Year 12 Mathematics at CIT some years back (much to the despair of the old-guard teachers, for whom the world of assessment consisted only of tests, at one minute per mark, and a "marks for ticks" approach). Students were interested in, for example, what constituted 'deep understand' versus 'understanding'; how would the different descriptions be manifested in reality? My answer was that I would be using my professional judgement based on evidence, but not just test or assignment evidence (the summative assessment) but also formative assessment right down to casual conversations in the corridor about our classwork. It was extremely draining, but I got to see who knew their stuff and to what level they knew it; it fitted my definition of assessment: "Assessment is the process of gathering evidence so as to make judgements about the extent and nature of a person's progress in a course of study".
Perhaps this is why we're encouraged to do so much informal or semi-formal writing for this course, so that our assessor can get as complete a picture of us as learners as is humanly possible within the time and location (or temporospatial if you're into sociocultural studies) constraints inposed upon us by the world.
Responce 2: To a fellow student
I can see your point with respect to just calling it an assessment grid. Part of the reason the term "rubric" is used is to try and get people (all people involved in education: students, teachers, parents, the whole community) thinking differently about the assessment process per se. If the same language is used then peoples' beliefs won't be pushed. Language has to change. Even though it bears a superficial resemblance to the 'traditional' assessment grid, there is a much, much deeper pedagogical movement underpinning the promotion and use of the term "rubric".
To confuse matters even further rubrics come in two dominant flavours: analytic and holistic. I personally am a huge fan of holistic rubrics, but that suits the style of teacher that I am. Analytic rubrics in the hands of novices (at using rubrics) can end up atomising an assessment task to the point of absurdity.
Finale
So what have I discovered this week? What new part of my mental landscape has been further illuminated such that I could see its connection to the already visible? That's very hard to answer. I think for me this week has been learning-as-therapy. The key topics (indeed the key topic of this strand: Literacy Across the Curriculum) are something about which I have felt quite strongly for many years, and something for which I paid a very high price both professionally and in terms of my physical and mental health. I was the Year 12 Maths teacher who advocated the modelling of language and literacy skills to Maths students. Unfortunately I was in an environment so openly hostile to such a point of view that I had to leave the area and take extended sick leave. I am only now almost physically recovered from the pschological trauma of that time.
""Inspiration", "Hope", and to small extent "Vindication" are words that sum up a most remakable and amazing week.
Andrew Trost
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