I was thinking about logic today (my personal issues with Aristotle notwithstanding), in particualr the terms "necessary" and "sufficient". My first ever private student (I used to run a tutoring business) was having trouble with truth tables and necessary and sufficient conditions. I rememebr having great difficulty explaining the terms to him, for to me they seemed completely obvious. What is now obvious is that I hadn't at that stage of my teaching career learned or recognised how important language is in our human endeavours. The words (in the context of logic) meant nothing to him, were obvious to me, but yet I didn't see that as the sticking point.
I think we (as teachers, as humans) take language for granted, and assume that everyone is playing by our own personal rules. The writer writes the book with an image in mind; the reader constructs their own.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The thing I find exciting about Years 11 and 12...
...is no the curricumlum that I'm supposed to be teaching, but rather all the other exciting things happening around the school. Last night I photographed the live music performances of the Live Music section, and today I came prepared to fix the chicken enclosure in the Ag Science section. Unfortunately for the chickens the rain has intervened.
Years 11 and 12 are not particularly different to my regular teaching. But it's not an opportunity lost: while the content and preparation are fairly straightforward, in fact I can pretty much do it off the top of my head, it for this very same reason that I'm getting something out if it. My energy is being turned to teaching beyond the classroom; putting into practice the idea of literacy across the curriculum.
For instance, an hour or so ago in Year 12 physics we watched a video/doco on the Chernobyl disaster. What a great opportunity to discuss the human and political aspects of what is viewed ostensibly (in physics circles at least) as a physics incident.
Now my ears are ringing from having spent lunch time listening to one of the worst metal trios of all time. On Monday I'll probably bring my bass guitar in and turn it into a quartet (after I fix the chook pen.
at
Years 11 and 12 are not particularly different to my regular teaching. But it's not an opportunity lost: while the content and preparation are fairly straightforward, in fact I can pretty much do it off the top of my head, it for this very same reason that I'm getting something out if it. My energy is being turned to teaching beyond the classroom; putting into practice the idea of literacy across the curriculum.
For instance, an hour or so ago in Year 12 physics we watched a video/doco on the Chernobyl disaster. What a great opportunity to discuss the human and political aspects of what is viewed ostensibly (in physics circles at least) as a physics incident.
Now my ears are ringing from having spent lunch time listening to one of the worst metal trios of all time. On Monday I'll probably bring my bass guitar in and turn it into a quartet (after I fix the chook pen.
at
Saturday, August 8, 2009
ELPC G2 Entry #3
Introduction
So here I sit on yet another Sunday morning, putting my thoughts in order. Again a lot has happened during the week: this week I became a different (hopefully better) facilitator of maths understanding to adults (note: I've chosen my words very carefully there; it's not just a case of intentional prolixity) because of the influence of my STS (Science) lecturer/tutor and Strand 1 of ELPC G2.
Puposefully, I had one of my adults students read a sentence from our prescribed text (I didn't prescribe the text; personally I think it is one of the worst maths texts on the face of the planet; only fear of litigation prevents me from naming and shaming it; the fact that we still use it is tesimony to the extreme inertia of large organisations) and then asked "What does that mean?" There was no problem with the reading of the sentence, but in terms of meaning, well, let's just say "not a lot."
Whose "fault" is this? The writer of the textbook? The language training the students had received prior to their appearance in my classroom? "Who owns the problem?" is a for more germane question, one which gets to the heart of Strand 1 of ELPC G2: Literacy across the curriculum. We all do. Literacy (in, as I've said before, the very small-c catholic sense of the word) is the domain of every teacher.
As usual I have cut-and-pasted my individual responses from throughout the week. Let's have a look at them:
The Textbook (Tovani) Chapter 4
Apologies in advance for what I suspect is going to be a somewhat rambling and stream-of-consciouness response (actually while it may be the former, it is definitely not the latter; I've just written a substantial synopsis of the chapter, which I will try to flesh out as I work through it).
In the first paragraph Tovani makes a comment to the effect of "too much content and not enough time". This is a statement I have heard, and continue to hear at CIT, BSSS, and High-School levels. I don't hear it at Primary School; the complaint there is usually "too much planning is required". This is a curriculum issue, which is then ultimately a political issue. There are a bunch of people working at the curriculum level who are being squeezed from above by Government and bashed from below by teachers. I know this. I've been in the middle. The content/time issue is not going to go away while education is a political football. Unfortunately, in this age of creeping credentialism (or educational inflation) where higher and higher levels of formal education are required in order to be eligible to do the same task (ie be employed) education is never going to be divorced from overt political influence. I don't know what the answer is, but I do recall a book about teaching and subversion which may hold some clues....
Who's driving the curriculum, and the textbooks being used? In my experience it is often the teachers and non-teachers sitting on curriculum panels. It is my impression that they end up choosing a textbook that they themselves would like to use. They seem to forget that they themselves are trained learners who are not seeing this material for the first time.
I concur with the Richard Strong quote, but perhaps for different reasons. Whereas I think he sees the presence of the textbook from a rather pragmatic or even defeatist position, the simple biological fact is that we get most of the information about our world through our eyes. The notion of "multi-sensory learning experiences" is a bit of a nonsense really, for how often do we (and did we) ever learn apart from through our eyes. I guess I'm saying that the textbook, and reading, are with us for the long haul. Hence the importance of getting it right.
"Teachers are frustrated because students don't remember information from previous chapters, so they constantly feel as though they have to back up and reteach material." I think this is another symptom of time pressure. What if the explicit expectation was that students actually require a certain degree of recapping? Many good/effective teachers begin the next lesson by going back to halfway through the previous lesson.
So, what is accessible text? Tovani says "interesting, well written, and appropriately matched". The final aspect could possibly be teased out via authentic assessment, but the first two points make me ask "as measured by whom?" Ultimately teachers do the measuring, and to do so accurately they must attempt to walk in their students' shoes.
"Rigour" is an interesting term. Epistemologically, rigour must be measured against whatever gold-standard of knowledge already exists. Pragmatically, rigour is perhaps that level of precision with which the student is ready to receive new knowledge. We have to walk a fine line between what may not be strictly speaking correct, but "true enough" for the time being in the current context. To determine the appropriateness of a text (and by extension the rigour with which the topic will be dealt) Tovani says "I must consider how much reading they have done in the past, and how well they read now." I love this; to me it says "look at at where they've come from and where they are now, then we'll worry about where they want to go". This is completely at odds with most post-primary education and training models in the Western world. The TAFE system in Australia is not at all formally interested in where you come from. It's all about where you want to go; we'll get you up and running (but we won't see if you can walk first).
Accessible text should "challenge the student". Again, I don't think enough teachers put themselves in the students shoes; they end up choosing something that challenges them (and frustrates and humiliates the student).
Text sets: Tovani wonders "why middle and high school teachers couldn't use the notion and adapt it a little". I too wonder why. I think the reason it doesn't happen (generally speaking) is that the wheels of large organisations, large systems, move very slowly. There is a huge amount of historical inertia behind our education system. But things can and do change, and we can contribute to that change. Next year many of us will be out in schools, some casually, other permanently. We will all enter a system that has not been living and breathing the cutting-edge research that has been our air for the last few months. There will be a temptation and/or a pressure upon you to conform to the existing paradigm. "Subvert it", I say to you. If you believe in the things we are learning at uni then stick to your guns. Eventually YOU will be representative of the dominant paradigm within the school, and new teachers will emulate YOU. Now how cool could that be?
Putting my Derrida glasses on for a moment and reading between the lines, it appears to me that either (a) Tovani is not at all a maths person, or (b) she has encountered the same difficulties with maths folk as I have, namely extreme resistance to change. Her suggestions for maths text sets are simplistic and limited. Maths people, put your thinking hats on and imagine a maths class that worked around concepts (which is what a text set will emphasise) rather than content. That is my dream.
This post did not generate any written replies or comments. I hope it was read, for I do think I have something to offer preservice teachers, namely teaching experience and a considered point a view which is by no means the norm (thus, I think, making it good Devil's Advocate material) out there in school land.
The Tutorial (Week 3)
I felt a great range of emotions during and after the tutorial. I saw evidence of students who were clearly there only because they had to be (a graduation requirement in Tovani's words) through to people who enjoyed being exposed to new ideas, ideas which upset their own world views, and caused them to reassess their values and beliefs.
There is not enough "meta" going on. I would like to see students stepping back from time to time and asking themselves, or the class as a whole, "what's the big picture here". Mmmm.... I don't think I'm being very lucid and coherent right now, and my tone is certainly not that of a member of the class. I guess for me the idea of rubrics is not new, and I feel a little hamstrung by a conversation which, for me, occurred many years ago and led to a quite traumatic outcome. Maybe I should abstain from this particular discussion?
There were so many subtle lessons being provided by Dr Shann. His presentation was a performance designed to illicit an a responce. We had to assess someone, using a device with which many were not familiar. It makes me feel that there is an important subject missing from the Grad Dip Ed program: "What is Assessment?" We are all going to be doing it, and our decisions will affect people's lives, but do we know what we're doing and why?
Why use a rubric? Why not just give it a mark out of ten? Should we feel happy when the class average is nice and high (yes in high school, no in college; a high class average seriously disadvantages the top students)?
My apologies for perhaps sounding pompous and all-knowing, but on Wednesday I felt I was in a place through which I had already travelled. In hindsight I can say that the hostility of the room was non-existent compared to the hostility I have encountered in staffroom, and which some, if not all, will encounter in staff rooms on the matter of assessment and rubrics.
Further commentary
This weeks tutorials led to a robust exchange about assessment, rubrics, and the epistemological issues surrounding testimony. In response to another student's strong feeling about the nature of the assessment process being applied to our work I replied as follows:
Just being the Devil's Advocate, define "interesting", "good", "clear", "novel", "appropriate level", "relevant", just to pick a few.
No matter how much we may wish to the contrary, language defines everything, and with language comes interpretation and subjectivity. Whether one goes with the "gut feeling" (and for many the "gut feeling" will be surprising "accurate" once one has been teaching/assessing the same material for a while) or the atomised-to-death (marks for ticks) approach, at the end of the day someone's value and belief system is imposed.
There is no teacher-proof nor student-proof assessment. And that's OK. It's just how it is.
The original poster replied as follows (I have made a couple of edits to preserve as best I could the anonimity of the participants):
This was written by my students. I agree that "interesting" is subjective, but I think "clear", "novel" and "relevant" are reasonably objective. I am not putting this forward as a suggested rubric or set of criteria, as I said in my post I was offering it as an example of something different. It's not quite what I would have written, but it's close, the students were happy with it and they used it.
Gut feeling is one thing, and when I use a set of criteria the mark generated usually agrees with my gut feeling, but gut feeling alone does not give acceptable transparency, and gives no useful feedback to the student. How would you feel about being given a mark with the feedback "it sort of felt like a 75 in my large intestine"?
If a rubric is going to be of value as a learning tool to the students, the rubric has to be meaningful, and it has to applied, and their mark according to it reported to them. That's an aspect that hasn't been discussed yet - assessing for learning.
I've never been offered a bribe, but I know lecturers who have been. Hang around academia long enough and you see and hear all sorts of things. Transparency is important. The perception/visibility of fairness and honesty is important as well as the fact of it.
My response to what is, I feel, a perfectly valid, but unsound, position:
"Clear": to whom?
"Novel": as judged by whom?
"Relevant": as above.
"The students were happy with it and they used it": Of course they were happy with it. It is a mirror of the beliefs and expectations about "science" and "assessment" they brought with them, beliefs and expectations forged by the community and the school system.
Right now a whole bunch of people are having their own belief system challenged. That's one of the central tenets of teacher education. It's not comfortable. It creates doubt. To relieve doubt one can fight harder to preserve the entrenched position, or as John Yossarian (the protagonist of Heller's "Catch 22") does, one can "flee forward" into the unknown.
Science/Maths (particularly Maths) folk are, by and large, locked into a right/wrong mentality, and highly resistant to fleeing forward. I know this because I managed to unlock myself from it, but not without enlightening and aggravating more than a few people in that ACT system.
At the end of the day a human being is going to make a value judgement about the performance of another human being's work. To get really specific we're dealing with the epistemological issues associated with "testimony", so my comfort or otherwise depends on whose large intestine the 75 is coming from.
My true and sincere apologies if this is coming across as hostile. It's not my intention, but until one's own values are subjected to intense scrutiny that person will, as a teacher, do little more than perpetuate the current learning culture that pervades our world. Personally I think that is a sad thing, for, especially in maths, the dominant culture is one of fatalism and mediocrity.
I guess I'm all for the post-modern reassessment of current practices.
Re-reading my last post, I find myself unmoved from my position. The human aspect of any transactional process (eg asessment as a part of the learning process) cannot be removed, and limiting it in the name of "transparency" and "accountabilty" (important words without a doubt, but words which carry an insidious undertone when applied to mass education, words which have infiltrated education along with standardised testing and reducing a student's worth to a single number) is to reduce the richness of education that can occur when minds meet rather than collide.
Andrew Trost
So here I sit on yet another Sunday morning, putting my thoughts in order. Again a lot has happened during the week: this week I became a different (hopefully better) facilitator of maths understanding to adults (note: I've chosen my words very carefully there; it's not just a case of intentional prolixity) because of the influence of my STS (Science) lecturer/tutor and Strand 1 of ELPC G2.
Puposefully, I had one of my adults students read a sentence from our prescribed text (I didn't prescribe the text; personally I think it is one of the worst maths texts on the face of the planet; only fear of litigation prevents me from naming and shaming it; the fact that we still use it is tesimony to the extreme inertia of large organisations) and then asked "What does that mean?" There was no problem with the reading of the sentence, but in terms of meaning, well, let's just say "not a lot."
Whose "fault" is this? The writer of the textbook? The language training the students had received prior to their appearance in my classroom? "Who owns the problem?" is a for more germane question, one which gets to the heart of Strand 1 of ELPC G2: Literacy across the curriculum. We all do. Literacy (in, as I've said before, the very small-c catholic sense of the word) is the domain of every teacher.
As usual I have cut-and-pasted my individual responses from throughout the week. Let's have a look at them:
The Textbook (Tovani) Chapter 4
Apologies in advance for what I suspect is going to be a somewhat rambling and stream-of-consciouness response (actually while it may be the former, it is definitely not the latter; I've just written a substantial synopsis of the chapter, which I will try to flesh out as I work through it).
In the first paragraph Tovani makes a comment to the effect of "too much content and not enough time". This is a statement I have heard, and continue to hear at CIT, BSSS, and High-School levels. I don't hear it at Primary School; the complaint there is usually "too much planning is required". This is a curriculum issue, which is then ultimately a political issue. There are a bunch of people working at the curriculum level who are being squeezed from above by Government and bashed from below by teachers. I know this. I've been in the middle. The content/time issue is not going to go away while education is a political football. Unfortunately, in this age of creeping credentialism (or educational inflation) where higher and higher levels of formal education are required in order to be eligible to do the same task (ie be employed) education is never going to be divorced from overt political influence. I don't know what the answer is, but I do recall a book about teaching and subversion which may hold some clues....
Who's driving the curriculum, and the textbooks being used? In my experience it is often the teachers and non-teachers sitting on curriculum panels. It is my impression that they end up choosing a textbook that they themselves would like to use. They seem to forget that they themselves are trained learners who are not seeing this material for the first time.
I concur with the Richard Strong quote, but perhaps for different reasons. Whereas I think he sees the presence of the textbook from a rather pragmatic or even defeatist position, the simple biological fact is that we get most of the information about our world through our eyes. The notion of "multi-sensory learning experiences" is a bit of a nonsense really, for how often do we (and did we) ever learn apart from through our eyes. I guess I'm saying that the textbook, and reading, are with us for the long haul. Hence the importance of getting it right.
"Teachers are frustrated because students don't remember information from previous chapters, so they constantly feel as though they have to back up and reteach material." I think this is another symptom of time pressure. What if the explicit expectation was that students actually require a certain degree of recapping? Many good/effective teachers begin the next lesson by going back to halfway through the previous lesson.
So, what is accessible text? Tovani says "interesting, well written, and appropriately matched". The final aspect could possibly be teased out via authentic assessment, but the first two points make me ask "as measured by whom?" Ultimately teachers do the measuring, and to do so accurately they must attempt to walk in their students' shoes.
"Rigour" is an interesting term. Epistemologically, rigour must be measured against whatever gold-standard of knowledge already exists. Pragmatically, rigour is perhaps that level of precision with which the student is ready to receive new knowledge. We have to walk a fine line between what may not be strictly speaking correct, but "true enough" for the time being in the current context. To determine the appropriateness of a text (and by extension the rigour with which the topic will be dealt) Tovani says "I must consider how much reading they have done in the past, and how well they read now." I love this; to me it says "look at at where they've come from and where they are now, then we'll worry about where they want to go". This is completely at odds with most post-primary education and training models in the Western world. The TAFE system in Australia is not at all formally interested in where you come from. It's all about where you want to go; we'll get you up and running (but we won't see if you can walk first).
Accessible text should "challenge the student". Again, I don't think enough teachers put themselves in the students shoes; they end up choosing something that challenges them (and frustrates and humiliates the student).
Text sets: Tovani wonders "why middle and high school teachers couldn't use the notion and adapt it a little". I too wonder why. I think the reason it doesn't happen (generally speaking) is that the wheels of large organisations, large systems, move very slowly. There is a huge amount of historical inertia behind our education system. But things can and do change, and we can contribute to that change. Next year many of us will be out in schools, some casually, other permanently. We will all enter a system that has not been living and breathing the cutting-edge research that has been our air for the last few months. There will be a temptation and/or a pressure upon you to conform to the existing paradigm. "Subvert it", I say to you. If you believe in the things we are learning at uni then stick to your guns. Eventually YOU will be representative of the dominant paradigm within the school, and new teachers will emulate YOU. Now how cool could that be?
Putting my Derrida glasses on for a moment and reading between the lines, it appears to me that either (a) Tovani is not at all a maths person, or (b) she has encountered the same difficulties with maths folk as I have, namely extreme resistance to change. Her suggestions for maths text sets are simplistic and limited. Maths people, put your thinking hats on and imagine a maths class that worked around concepts (which is what a text set will emphasise) rather than content. That is my dream.
This post did not generate any written replies or comments. I hope it was read, for I do think I have something to offer preservice teachers, namely teaching experience and a considered point a view which is by no means the norm (thus, I think, making it good Devil's Advocate material) out there in school land.
The Tutorial (Week 3)
I felt a great range of emotions during and after the tutorial. I saw evidence of students who were clearly there only because they had to be (a graduation requirement in Tovani's words) through to people who enjoyed being exposed to new ideas, ideas which upset their own world views, and caused them to reassess their values and beliefs.
There is not enough "meta" going on. I would like to see students stepping back from time to time and asking themselves, or the class as a whole, "what's the big picture here". Mmmm.... I don't think I'm being very lucid and coherent right now, and my tone is certainly not that of a member of the class. I guess for me the idea of rubrics is not new, and I feel a little hamstrung by a conversation which, for me, occurred many years ago and led to a quite traumatic outcome. Maybe I should abstain from this particular discussion?
There were so many subtle lessons being provided by Dr Shann. His presentation was a performance designed to illicit an a responce. We had to assess someone, using a device with which many were not familiar. It makes me feel that there is an important subject missing from the Grad Dip Ed program: "What is Assessment?" We are all going to be doing it, and our decisions will affect people's lives, but do we know what we're doing and why?
Why use a rubric? Why not just give it a mark out of ten? Should we feel happy when the class average is nice and high (yes in high school, no in college; a high class average seriously disadvantages the top students)?
My apologies for perhaps sounding pompous and all-knowing, but on Wednesday I felt I was in a place through which I had already travelled. In hindsight I can say that the hostility of the room was non-existent compared to the hostility I have encountered in staffroom, and which some, if not all, will encounter in staff rooms on the matter of assessment and rubrics.
Further commentary
This weeks tutorials led to a robust exchange about assessment, rubrics, and the epistemological issues surrounding testimony. In response to another student's strong feeling about the nature of the assessment process being applied to our work I replied as follows:
Just being the Devil's Advocate, define "interesting", "good", "clear", "novel", "appropriate level", "relevant", just to pick a few.
No matter how much we may wish to the contrary, language defines everything, and with language comes interpretation and subjectivity. Whether one goes with the "gut feeling" (and for many the "gut feeling" will be surprising "accurate" once one has been teaching/assessing the same material for a while) or the atomised-to-death (marks for ticks) approach, at the end of the day someone's value and belief system is imposed.
There is no teacher-proof nor student-proof assessment. And that's OK. It's just how it is.
The original poster replied as follows (I have made a couple of edits to preserve as best I could the anonimity of the participants):
This was written by my students. I agree that "interesting" is subjective, but I think "clear", "novel" and "relevant" are reasonably objective. I am not putting this forward as a suggested rubric or set of criteria, as I said in my post I was offering it as an example of something different. It's not quite what I would have written, but it's close, the students were happy with it and they used it.
Gut feeling is one thing, and when I use a set of criteria the mark generated usually agrees with my gut feeling, but gut feeling alone does not give acceptable transparency, and gives no useful feedback to the student. How would you feel about being given a mark with the feedback "it sort of felt like a 75 in my large intestine"?
If a rubric is going to be of value as a learning tool to the students, the rubric has to be meaningful, and it has to applied, and their mark according to it reported to them. That's an aspect that hasn't been discussed yet - assessing for learning.
I've never been offered a bribe, but I know lecturers who have been. Hang around academia long enough and you see and hear all sorts of things. Transparency is important. The perception/visibility of fairness and honesty is important as well as the fact of it.
My response to what is, I feel, a perfectly valid, but unsound, position:
"Clear": to whom?
"Novel": as judged by whom?
"Relevant": as above.
"The students were happy with it and they used it": Of course they were happy with it. It is a mirror of the beliefs and expectations about "science" and "assessment" they brought with them, beliefs and expectations forged by the community and the school system.
Right now a whole bunch of people are having their own belief system challenged. That's one of the central tenets of teacher education. It's not comfortable. It creates doubt. To relieve doubt one can fight harder to preserve the entrenched position, or as John Yossarian (the protagonist of Heller's "Catch 22") does, one can "flee forward" into the unknown.
Science/Maths (particularly Maths) folk are, by and large, locked into a right/wrong mentality, and highly resistant to fleeing forward. I know this because I managed to unlock myself from it, but not without enlightening and aggravating more than a few people in that ACT system.
At the end of the day a human being is going to make a value judgement about the performance of another human being's work. To get really specific we're dealing with the epistemological issues associated with "testimony", so my comfort or otherwise depends on whose large intestine the 75 is coming from.
My true and sincere apologies if this is coming across as hostile. It's not my intention, but until one's own values are subjected to intense scrutiny that person will, as a teacher, do little more than perpetuate the current learning culture that pervades our world. Personally I think that is a sad thing, for, especially in maths, the dominant culture is one of fatalism and mediocrity.
I guess I'm all for the post-modern reassessment of current practices.
Re-reading my last post, I find myself unmoved from my position. The human aspect of any transactional process (eg asessment as a part of the learning process) cannot be removed, and limiting it in the name of "transparency" and "accountabilty" (important words without a doubt, but words which carry an insidious undertone when applied to mass education, words which have infiltrated education along with standardised testing and reducing a student's worth to a single number) is to reduce the richness of education that can occur when minds meet rather than collide.
Andrew Trost
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
ELPC G2 Entry #2
Captain's Log. Sunday, 2nd of August, 2009.
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:
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
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
ELPC G2 Entry #1 (A boring title, I know)
"But I'm not an English Teacher: is literacy really my business?" Two things immediately spring to mind: (a) how many journals/blogs have opened with that particular quote, and (b) the quote itself presupposes, or at least certainly implies, that literacy is the domain of the English teacher. While the first point is purposefully flippant (although possibly still of interest; why would so many people open an article the same way?) the second is very important.
We all have a belief as to what constitutes literacy. Very few of us have much doubt in our belief (here I'm using the language and ideas of Charles Peirce in his article "The Fixation of Belief"), but is our belief justified, and are there other sound or valid beliefs about the nature of literacy?
What is literacy? To many the term refers exclusively to reading and writing. I have a very different view. "Literacy is the ability to authentically participate in a given context." By this definition possibly the most literate folk to have ever existed were the Japanese Ninja. Their job description not only included killing people without leaving marks, but such diverse activities as ettiquete, diplomacy, languages, singing, dancing, and many more, such that they could participate authentically in any context; they could blend in. To be illiterate is to feel uncomfortable, unable, out of place. While I'm not explicitely suggesting that we revive the (mostly) lost arts and skills of the Ninja, I am suggesting that literacy must be viewed in a much broader context than the opening quote suggests.
For the moment however I would like to share an example from my own personal experience, one which is more in line with the opening quote than with the Ninja.
"Literacy is the domain of every teacher" was one of my mantras from 2001 through 'til 2006. During this time I taught almost exclusively in the CIT Year 12 program (maths and physics). My personal research interest was assessment, for I felt that the "traditional" maths test and the "marks for ticks" approach to marking used by many maths teachers (particularly those of the previous generation) left a lot to be desired. There was a hard ceiling of 100% beyond which no student could go; the best students were not given the opportunity to demonstrate their ability.
This is an extremely important point in Senior Secondary Studies, where assessment is normative. If the mean score of a class or cohort is high (which is what tends to happen in maths because maths teachers, possibly all teachers, err on the side of being generous) then the corresponding student z-scores (from which their course scores and UAI are subsequently derived) will not be as high as they should.
"So what separates the top students from the rest?" I thought to myself, and how could I rewrite or restructure the assessment process to allow these students to shine, without disadvantaging other students. My reading and thinking suggested that "deep understanding" is one of the key hallmarks of the top student, and the ability to "explain" was the indicator of such understanding. In a nutshell: if you can explain something then you understand it.
So I had mathematics students write explanations as well as perform calculations. At that point a new problem emerged.
"If you can explain something then you understand it" is logically equivalent to "if you don't understand it then you can't explain it". In the classroom it wasn't so neat. There were, and still are, students whom I knew understood something, but their ability to explain clearly in the written form left more than a little to be desired. My system of written explanation as an indicator of deep understanding had hit a stumbling block. The solution tore the CIT Year 12 Maths department apart.
I spent considerable class time teaching students how to analyse blocks of (mathematical) text and write explanations of mathematical problems/solutions/situations. In a sense I became an English teacher in the Maths classroom.
"But that's not Maths!" was the cry from other Maths teachers. Isn't it? By improving reading and writing skills (the "conventional" view of what constitutes literacy) had I not improved the mathematical literacy of students; raised their level of comfort in the Maths classroom? Students were now able to articulate mathematical ideas that might otherwise have eluded them if constrained to the signs and symbols of Mathematics.
Effective communication is an essential skill, and hence literacy, in all its forms, is the domain of every teacher.
We all have a belief as to what constitutes literacy. Very few of us have much doubt in our belief (here I'm using the language and ideas of Charles Peirce in his article "The Fixation of Belief"), but is our belief justified, and are there other sound or valid beliefs about the nature of literacy?
What is literacy? To many the term refers exclusively to reading and writing. I have a very different view. "Literacy is the ability to authentically participate in a given context." By this definition possibly the most literate folk to have ever existed were the Japanese Ninja. Their job description not only included killing people without leaving marks, but such diverse activities as ettiquete, diplomacy, languages, singing, dancing, and many more, such that they could participate authentically in any context; they could blend in. To be illiterate is to feel uncomfortable, unable, out of place. While I'm not explicitely suggesting that we revive the (mostly) lost arts and skills of the Ninja, I am suggesting that literacy must be viewed in a much broader context than the opening quote suggests.
For the moment however I would like to share an example from my own personal experience, one which is more in line with the opening quote than with the Ninja.
"Literacy is the domain of every teacher" was one of my mantras from 2001 through 'til 2006. During this time I taught almost exclusively in the CIT Year 12 program (maths and physics). My personal research interest was assessment, for I felt that the "traditional" maths test and the "marks for ticks" approach to marking used by many maths teachers (particularly those of the previous generation) left a lot to be desired. There was a hard ceiling of 100% beyond which no student could go; the best students were not given the opportunity to demonstrate their ability.
This is an extremely important point in Senior Secondary Studies, where assessment is normative. If the mean score of a class or cohort is high (which is what tends to happen in maths because maths teachers, possibly all teachers, err on the side of being generous) then the corresponding student z-scores (from which their course scores and UAI are subsequently derived) will not be as high as they should.
"So what separates the top students from the rest?" I thought to myself, and how could I rewrite or restructure the assessment process to allow these students to shine, without disadvantaging other students. My reading and thinking suggested that "deep understanding" is one of the key hallmarks of the top student, and the ability to "explain" was the indicator of such understanding. In a nutshell: if you can explain something then you understand it.
So I had mathematics students write explanations as well as perform calculations. At that point a new problem emerged.
"If you can explain something then you understand it" is logically equivalent to "if you don't understand it then you can't explain it". In the classroom it wasn't so neat. There were, and still are, students whom I knew understood something, but their ability to explain clearly in the written form left more than a little to be desired. My system of written explanation as an indicator of deep understanding had hit a stumbling block. The solution tore the CIT Year 12 Maths department apart.
I spent considerable class time teaching students how to analyse blocks of (mathematical) text and write explanations of mathematical problems/solutions/situations. In a sense I became an English teacher in the Maths classroom.
"But that's not Maths!" was the cry from other Maths teachers. Isn't it? By improving reading and writing skills (the "conventional" view of what constitutes literacy) had I not improved the mathematical literacy of students; raised their level of comfort in the Maths classroom? Students were now able to articulate mathematical ideas that might otherwise have eluded them if constrained to the signs and symbols of Mathematics.
Effective communication is an essential skill, and hence literacy, in all its forms, is the domain of every teacher.
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