In the Moodle: keeping in step, and all that jazz

I am NOT good at conforming with my peers.

I'm the one who had Barbie before she was fashionable, and was over her by the time she became trailer-trash common. I'm the one who walks into a clothing store, takes one look at 'this season's fashion colours' (on one memorable occasion insipid blue, diluted-sputum green and a shade politely called 'mulberry' which I believe is more accurately described by the onomatopoeic 'puce'), turns on her heel and goes to find an op shop because I'd rather be uncool than be taken for a fool. (Pardon the poetry.  It just happens.)

Worse still, I'm the one tapping my feet waiting for most of my peers to finish what they're trying to say at some idiot social gathering, because I'm not pissed, I'm way ahead of them and it's taking all my self-control not to interrupt and tell them what they're trying to say. Being smart has its drawbacks. It makes life within the cohort a little, um, trying at times, because it's so damn hard to pretend you're still interested when your brain has 'shot round the corner' (to paraphrase Lawrence, 1992).

Pardon me referencing my 7-year-old son, but he put it so well, even at that age. He's gifted too.

So, given that my last measured IQ was in the sort of range that causes people to make an excuse to walk away because they feel vaguely uncomfortable if it's mentioned, and given that writing is my passion and delight, a compulsory 'academic literacy' course was always going to be a bit of a doddle.  Today, July 31st, I found myself doing an assignment that's due on September 2nd, just for fun.  And because I could.

You see, the reason I can't keep in step is that I'm intrinsically different. Giftedness is a sort of special need. I'd rather have it than not have it, of course; but being different does cause a few problems if it's not considered in the context of distributing marks to randomly allocated pairs of students.

Yep, I could hand in my 'academic paragraphs' right now, and I'd put money on getting (at the very least) a distinction. The only thing I found difficult was how to get enough references into 300 words to be sure of an HD (and still have room for the tiny allowable amount of original content).

But I can't just hand it in and move on; that's not the way it works here. At TAFE, while doing my Diploma in Children's Services to satisfy the paper-pushers, I was able to bully the lecturers into feeding me material at my pace, and so I finished the course in exactly half the scheduled time. But not here. Here, I have to prove that I can work with my colleagues (?) by submitting my paragraphs via the internet to a stranger peer for criticism (am I the only one who sees the bodgy in this?), then critiquing her paragraphs in return.

There are several problems implicit in this (other than the bodginess of the premise that internet communication based around conformity to a rubric bears any resemblance to working out real issues with real-life colleagues). The most irritating, to me, is that I have to mark time until my randomly chosen 'paragraph partner' catches up, closely followed by the irritation of the random malfunctions that seem to grace the university communication software (appropriately titled 'Moodle', presumably in order to attract bad puns on the theme of student discontent, but more reminiscent of a cross between a moggie and a poodle- pretending to be something special, but intrinsically badly behaved).

More concerning, though, is that this particular playing field is far from level. I have no doubt that I can mentor my partner to a point where her paragraphs will, in effect, have been marked and remarked by an expert before she submits them; hardly fair to the other students, but that's the luck of the draw I guess. Strangely, I didn't associate a university degree with a game of chance. If there was any justice, I would be teamed non-randomly with an ESL student who really needed my help, or allowed to help all the other students. (If there was any justice, I would have had an opportunity to demonstrate that I don't actually need to pay a cool $600 to do this subject- but yet again, I digress.)

And what of my poor random partner? God, I hope she's clever; I hope that, by some mad coincidence, she also has a stupidly high IQ but has chosen Early Childhood teaching because it's her vocation and she loves it. Because otherwise, I will be forced to apologise for the fact that there's not really much for her to say about my paragraphs that will get her marks for picking up my errors, rather than laughing with her about how we'll work out a way to pick holes in each other's masterpieces of rubric-adherence. (Yep, we also have to submit our critiques and responses for assessment.) Fat chance.

Failing that, I hope that the lecturers have devised a strategy for this situation which means that I haven't nobbled a fellow student simply by picking Group 14 from an anonymous list.

I refuse to pretend I'm less capable than I am. I shouldn't have to pretend. And in a situation like this, I simply can't keep in step.

Rejecting the rationales of referencing and research

I'm still reading, reading, reading. Not always what I'm meant to be reading, of course, but most of it's about education. (I do admit to having put in my footy tips. That required reading the team sheets.)

Some of what I read makes me wonder about this course I'm doing and how it stacks up against the very principles we're learning about, and whether the very methods required when we write our assignments are in themselves good educational practice.

I mean, take this quote from 'The Genius in Children', a blog by principal, father, educator and educational consultant Rick Ackerly. His ninth of ten purported educational myths is:

          "You have to sacrifice your imagination, your inquisitiveness and your self to get through the eye of the needle to the next level of academic achievement." (My bold type.)


           "On the contrary, imagination, inquisitiveness, integrity, grit, enthusiasm, inspiration, practice, perseverance, courage, etc. are the key disciplines of development of character and also the key elements of academic success. Fulfillment of self and mastering academic standards go hand in hand."

                  ("This March on Washington, Where's the Dream?" July 20, 2011)

My fear is that this sacrifice is exactly what I'll have to adjust to if I want to pass this course.  Referencing every single original thought and conclusion back to other people's evidence, rather than the evidence of my own 30 years' experience, feels very like the eye of that needle. My strengths are imagination, inquisitiveness, integrity and all those other key disciplines Ackerly mentions. I thrive on picking up the philosophical ball and running with it. But I have to tame my inspiration for long enough to drag my thought processes back through that tiny aperture of other people's research-based evidence.

My mind keeps diverting, you see. I read ten things that strike a chord, and immediately I want to write about it all and how it applies to my practice. Successfully applying what I learn to the context of my own learning spaces is surely the point of what I'm doing here.  Yet my creative synthesis of the information is hobbled by constantly having to search the material again for where exactly it said that, who said it, and then having to go through the pedantic structure and punctuation of formal referencing.  Dammit, I know I read it somewhere.

How on earth can any creative thought process survive that level of tedious interruption?

And it makes me feel that my own experience doesn't exist in this academic context, that it's worth nothing. If I've discovered something for myself and then find it's confirmed by a reading, it's the readings I must reference, not my reality. That's beyond irritating.

Yes, yes, yes, I know. Statistics, blah, blah, blah, scientific method, yaddah yaddah.  I'll quote the Ackerly post again:

      "As with parents, when schools try to shape children, they come out misshapen. Education is leading a person’s character out into the world to function effectively, creatively and gracefully within it. Drop "getting ahead" or "being behind". Help each child learn the skills they need to master real challenges."
                     ("This March on Washington, Where's the Dream?" July 20, 2011)

Do statistics address individuality? Do statistics address individual character, or do they encourage us to treat children as a homogenous mass and teach to the common denominator? Are they a measure of truth, or a call to value only the common?

What I find interesting about research is not the fat bit of the Bell curve, but the range. That is the real truth of dealing with children. And so I am less interested in representing research as gospel, and more interested in advocating for the individual child by representing each individual's truth as worthy in itself. There is power in anecdote. Anecdote is what we must respond to in our daily practice, not averages.

So the method of recording my learning in this course is, to me, completely counter-intuitive. Not because I reject the fascination of reading the results of research, or reject the acknowledgement of others' intellectual property, but because the process is a ball and chain around my mental processes and because I see statistics as blinkers.  The readings expand my mind- I know that- but does referencing them by a convoluted formal method within every second sentence really make me a better educator? And when the reader is forced to stumble through a lengthy set of referencing brackets mid-thought, does that make my words a powerful communication, or merely one that blindly follows an outdated paradigm? Does statistical research reveal truth, or encourage mediocrity?

I know what I think about all of that.

References


Ackerly, R: This March on Washington, Where's the Dream? posted to the blog 'The Genius in Children', July 20, 2011, accessed via Google 21.7.11

Cultural contexts, without judgment

I told you already, I LOVE the readings on eReserve.  I've just read the Kathryn Noori account of teaching within different educational and cultural contexts, 'Writing my own script: Pathways to teaching' (see reference below), and it gave me one of those 'aha' moments I was talking about.

In New Zealand, Kathryn discovered that teachers were allowed to be "the real actors in the classroom and had a real voice in the schools" (pg 18).  In Ethiopia, "Teaching became a real joy and a creative process" (pg 19).  

The parallel was apparent to me immediately. This freedom to be the 'actor in the classroom', this delight in the creative process of educating and caring for small children is what was missing from my last job.  How crushed I felt by the constraint of a system that didn't allow my voice to be heard. How deprived I felt by the lack of ongoing creative teaching process in a system that allowed no continuity of care. 

I recognised my own dilemmas; reading this article made me feel less 'wrong', less isolated by my (unpopular) decision to move on. 

But there was still more than this for me within the article. Reflecting on her experiences as I saved the file to my desktop, I compared the cultural contexts of the two centres where I now work.  Chalk and cheese was never a better analogy than for these two centres, each excellent in their own way in the art of meeting children's needs within their demographic.

I'll call Centre One 'Red, White and Blue' for its largely Caucasian context. It's a state-of-the-art, brand new long day care centre located in a nest of McMansions near the beach. Its grounds are carefully textured and landscaped with bark chip, Astroturf soft fall, sand, rocks of different sizes and projection and pavers.  Low-growing shrubs, many scented, dot the playground near low wooden structures like 'stages'.  Shade sails cover almost the entire area.

Internally, RWB is flooded with natural light, spotlessly clean and orderly. Care routines are quite tightly structured, with fairly strict adherence to free play time versus group activities time.  These activities are open-ended, but with careful preparation and intentional teaching moments built in. 

Then there's Centre Two, which I'll call 'Red, Black and Yellow' for its largely indigenous demographic. It's a preschool run by the CWA from an old building in a tiny riverside town where the local aborigines still have a foothold of accepted ownership. The classroom is half of the CWA hall, split off by ancient wooden dividers, brick-walled, echoing and naturally a little dark, with a carpet which is past its use-by date. The yard is sunny and grassed, with a small hill and medium sized native trees which can be climbed (though it's usually discouraged), a small bike track, a sandpit in its own latticed shed and a large bark-chip soft fall area with shadecloth over it, where old tractor tyres are the basis for most of the modular equipment. 

At both centres, I would describe the children as being generally happy and almost always well cared for.  At both centres, I feel content in my role, knowing that I have a voice and can be as creative as I like. 

But Kathryn Noori's writing made me imagine taking a child out of each centre and swapping them.  I read of her Ethiopian children sitting in the sun talking about the local wildlife and the strict enforcement of routines on Afro-American children in Denver, Colorado, and drew parallels with my own two centres. What would the effect be of placing a child in a different cultural setting from that which served his individual needs?

I imagined 'Ricky',  a 3-year-old indigenous boy with anger and violence issues from RBY, in an environment of loose rocks of throwing size, no grass and not much room to run without hurting himself when he falls.  It is physically impossible to be in touch with the earth, the dirt, at RWB. I thought of him caught in an ordered and fairly inflexible structure which required him to be out of the sun between 10am and 3pm, either resting or playing in a group situation- no exceptions.

The word that comes to mind is 'carnage'. At RBY, Ricky is regularly taken outside when he starts to lose control. Never mind that it's between 10 and 3, and the regulations say we should all be bunkered down out of the sun; this child, in his natural family setting, would certainly not be bound by such fearful over-regulation- and given his cultural need to be in touch with the natural world, plus his athleticism, emotional needs and high energy levels, I see that RWB could not serve this child's care needs without major philosophical changes by the teaching staff (and possibly some physical changes to the environment).

I think of 'Graeme', a 5-year-old Anglo-Saxon boy with anger and violence issues from RWB, in an environment where there is minimal daily structure.

The word that comes to mind is 'chaos'. I've seen Graeme in an unstructured environment at another centre, and I was constantly on the run trying to prevent him from (for example) beating other children over the head with whatever came to hand. Since moving to a highly structured and predictable environment, Graeme- whose family have moved house, state and country constantly since his birth- has started to regulate his own behaviour. A move to a centre where there was a level of permissiveness like that at RBY would undo him all over again, unless the staff were prepared to rethink their ever-flexible philosophy (which serves them well) and introduce a little more routine.

Dilemmas like this are ever-present in our lives as educarers (to use Magda Gerber's term). Children like Graeme will turn up at RBY; children like Ricky will turn up at RWB.  The challenge is to adjust our EC culture to meet their needs without disrupting a way of 'doing and being' that serves other children well.

Am I up to that? I hope so. Thanks to Ms Noori for making me think about it.

References

Noori, Kathryn 1996 'Writing my own script : Pathways to teaching' Source : Young children. Vol. 51, No. 3, 1996, pp. 17-19

Creation and criticism

I found it.

I found the sentence in my $60 textbook which made it worth the outlay of almost half my hard-earned, pitiful daily wage.  Here it is:

         "It is claimed that the creative facility resides in one hemisphere of our brain and the critical in the other, and that our brains are not capable of creating and criticising simultaneously." (Marshall and Rowland, 2006, pg 196)

(Sorry about the indent-fail, purists. 'Tab' doesn't work like that in Blogger.)

Well, after reading that I stared at the wall until my partner was moved to ask me if I was alright. Staring at the wall is actually a good sign in me (a fact my partner still hasn't quite absorbed- but I digress).  It means I'm deep in thought. You see, I know- know- that that statement isn't true.

Well, it's not true for me, anyway.  And that made me think, is my brain innately different to other people's brains? Am I the only person who simultaneously creates and criticises as I write?

I haven't given my evidence.  Backtrack.

When I wrote my sonnet 'First to Go', which won the Sydney Morning Herald Great Sonnet Competition 2000, the very first lines to form themselves in my head were the final couplet:

At last I stand. Let others judge: we know.
Your eyes demand it. I am first to go.

They came into my head fully-formed and perfect.  They were created with not only the exact meaning I wanted to convey as a summary of the poem's content, not only with impeccable iambic pentameter and rhyme, but with something I originally deemed serendipitous and that struck me later as incredible: an internal rhyme, 'stand' and 'demand'.

So which of these elements are creative, and which are critical? The content, the meaning is what would normally be deemed 'creative', while the structure of a poem as formal as the sonnet- concluding punching summary, metre and rhyme- is usually the result of painstaking writing and rewriting over many hours, days or even months. To add a craftsman's touch like an internal rhyme for extra subliminal punch- well, that requires luck and creative judgement as well as bloody hard work.

Yet my poet's brain was able to create and criticise at once to produce a perfect couplet which I never touched from the moment it was born to the day the poem was published.

And thus to my thesis, formed whilst staring at the wall.

A successful poet's mind is intrinsically different to that of other people, in that it has sufficient cross-hemisphere communication to simultaneously create and criticise.

Yep, that thought was worth $60.

And that brings me to the value of reading material with which I disagree.  This textbook has irritated the hell out of me, largely because I agree with nearly everything it says and resent the waste of money and time reading a text that preaches what I already know. It didn't make me think until I disagreed.

Here are the cognitive cattle prods that work for me:

Disagree.
Enlighten.

Yep, probably in that order.  Followed at a distance of some zillion kilometres by...

Confirm.

If I read something I disagree with, my brain goes into overdrive to examine which of us is wrong- I'll call that 'argumentative mode'.

If I read something that provides an 'aha' moment, I go into reflective mode and start to apply the new information to familiar or recalled situations that have puzzled me- let's call it 'solution mode'.

And if I read something that confirms what I already know or believe, it slides into the bank of facts I can pull out at whim to prove I'm right about something, making barely a ripple unless it's so bleeding obvious that it causes irritation. (Sorry, Marshall and Rowland, but you generally send me straight to 'PIA' [pain in the arse] mode. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.)

I am a terrible know-it-all. It irritates the hell out of people. Sorry. It's not my fault that I was born with a retentive mind, but I could probably work on the delivery. I mean well, truly I do, and I do try to be diplomatic. I know I irritate people. I have an enduring image in my mind of my very first serious boyfriend breaking his guitar over the end of the bed and screaming 'You're always bloody right!'

(He wasn't my boyfriend any more after that. Not because he'd shouted an unpalatable truth at me about the balance of intellectual power in the relationship, but because he'd wantonly broken a beautiful musical instrument. End of story.)

So one of my big challenges in doing this course will be to be patient and wait for the things that provoke 'argumentative' and 'solution'.  The other will be to cultivate some humility and try to assume that my lecturers will know more than me about some things- things that I will find useful in my practice- and will have the skill to both help me change my mind and shepherd me past 'PIA' mode.

(Warning: I'm singularly unimpressed by academic hubris. Knowledge had better be relevant and clearly expressed, or I'll get grumpy. I did like this line in Marshall and Rowland: "...terminology can easily degenerate into jargon if used carelessly or to impress" [pg 195], though I suspect the concept might be lost both on the average 17-year-old and some lecturers I've met.)

Cultivating humility will mean sometimes writing in the way that is expected, rather than trying to sneak around corners with my engaging (but sometimes academically inappropriate) personal literary style.  That will be difficult and irritating for me.

(For example, I'll have to curb my fondness for parentheses, italics and truncated sentences that start with prepositions and conjunctions. Like this one.)

(Yep, that paragraph had both creative flair and intrinsic critically formed structure, and I did it simultaneously. I'm being a smart-arse, but it does support my argument.)

It will mean forcing myself to sift through haystacks of 'PIA' material to find 'argumentative' or 'solution' needles. Patience is not one of my virtues, not with adults.  I can be patient pretty much all day, every day with children. By the end of that, I'm all 'patiented out', and that's when I'll be studying. There's a challenge in itself.

But rest assured, one little needle can go a long way with me.  I've already used this one to darn a hole in my understanding of myself versus the rest of the world. Yes, I know, that wasn't what it was meant to teach me, but hell- since when has that mattered, as long as I'm learning something?

Dammit, there are those italics again.

References

Marshall, L and Rowland F (2006). A Guide to Independent Learning (4th edition). NSW, Australia: Pearson Education.

Tied to my chair

I know, I know.  More fool me for going back to school, AGAIN, at my age.  But given that nobody seems to recognise that 30 years' experience in the classroom, a 4-year education qualification in Kindergarten to Year 12 Music (including teaching from 3-year-olds upwards) and having my own family has already made me an Early Childhood teacher, I'm doomed to further education until I get the 'right' piece of paper.

It's a credibility circus. There I am, being interviewed for Rattler Magazine, having my childcare blog read all over the world, turning up to work as a casual and improvising open-ended activities till I'm blue in the face with happy kids hanging off my every limb, ending up showing other teachers new ways of doing their documentation, identifying the interests of children I've only just met and writing obs on them when it's not even my job- because hello, you can do that easily when you've worked with kids for 30 years.

But I don't have the right piece of paper. I have everything, in fact, BUT the right piece of paper.

My textbook for EDEC310, 'Professionals in Early Childhood Education', arrived yesterday at 2pm. By 5pm I was good and ready to throw it out the window, where it could be trampled into the Bungawalbin mud by our flock of free-range turkeys until it was buried in slime. And then I could go join them. A free-range mud bath had appeal.

I don't mind being tied to my chair. Really. I sit here for hours at the Mac, writing my Aunt Annie childcare blog, reading about childcare practice and theory on other blogs and websites from all over the world and communicating with distant friends- hey, they're all distant from here, everything is distant from here, which is why I'm hooked up to an online university course in the first place. To me, professional development is fun. It's what I love, what I do.

So being told by a $60 textbook to watch my diet, take exercise, prepare my study area? To consider whether this is really the course I want to be doing? Give me a flipping refund, please. Childcare wages suck, and I'm already under the hammer just with the fees.

I'm 54, for chrissakes. If I don't know that stuff by now, there's no hope for me. Do you think I'd be sitting tied to my chair fighting my way through the morass of the UNE website instead of enjoying the Northern Rivers winter sun if I didn't know what I wanted, and how to get it?

And then there's the whole thing of learning how to write. Screen after screen after screen of learning how to write a paragraph, how to structure an essay, how to form an argument. Hello, I'm already a writer; a published writer. I know a few things about the art already.  Ask that journalist from Rattler Magazine: '...you raise some of the doubts/reservations many practitioners have about excursions, but don’t always articulate. PS. You write beautifully!' (Oh, don't forget to reference it. Weak author. Ingrid Maack, personal email, 19.7.11)

This very morning, I'm praised by a professional journalist for a respected industry magazine; this afternoon, I'm relegated to writer's kindy.

Does experience count for anything in EDEC310? Apparently not. I still have to swim through the treacle of the 'modules'. While tied to a chair.

Take plagiarism. Please, take it. Preferably a long, long way from here.  I've always rattled other people's chains for plagiarism. I picked 'My Sweet Lord' and 'She's So Fine' before the fuss began.  Yet here I am doing 'Academic Skills Online, Plagiarism' like a naiive schoolgirl, and remembering as the green ticks appear on my answers how I wrote a venomous letter to the editor of my high school magazine when I was 21 for publishing 'The Fog', by Erika Blenkinsopp (or something) without realising that a bloke called Carl Sandburg had actually had the blinking hide to write those exact words a few decades ago. (How dare he.)

I write, therefore I value my own intellectual property. And therefore, I value and acknowledge other people's intellectual property.

Tick.
Tick.
Tick.

It's just as well I'm committed, really committed, to staying in my seat and banging my head against the wall now and then on my way to achieving credibility. (On paper. I've already got credibility in real life. It's a circus.)

I live in hope that somewhere in this $60 textbook, there'll be something I don't know. Just one thing would be enough. Please.

In the end, I go on with the eReserve readings. I love the readings. I don't care if I'm not meant to read them yet; they're interesting. What the EYLF wanted to say, and what it was watered down to for political peace- that's a gem. Exploring indigenous culture and reconciliation in the EC classroom- right up my alley, confirming what I already do with the wildfire aboriginal preschoolers in my local community.

Yes, now I remember; this is why I'm doing this course. To learn more about what I love to do, to fill my consciousness with a heightened awareness of the issues, to stimulate my creativity about how to deal with them, to affirm that what I do every day has credibility no matter what level of the three-ring circus I'm dealing with.

That's why I'm here.