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
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