The fierce power of the past on philosophy and policy

My next uni task is to talk about my workplace's philosophy and policies in terms of its social history.

Hmm. Here I am, keeping a journal as a blog because hello, it's an electronic age, and being asked to talk about my workplace. Yet I've just had a bollicking for doing just that on my other blog from an employer (now an ex-employer). So let's start with talking about that particular 'philosophy' as an example, shall we?

At the moment, I'm told, that director is rewriting the workplace policies to prevent staff from blogging about work at all. Now, we all know that as professionals we never reveal confidential or identifying information- that would indeed be a hanging offence- but where does banning blogging which has respected those boundaries come in? Free interchange of information is the way the world is going, and ECE is already a huge part of that online interchange. Blogging ECTs all over the world are sharing stories of their experiences. I would class myself as particularly discreet in comparison with some of them (and my readers agree).

So, is all the fuss to do with the social history of this particular workplace?

It's church-run. Perhaps the church's influence suggests a certain conservatism, but they tend not to interfere with the actual running of the place (to their credit). 

I guess the centre serves a demographic where the parents can afford to sue. That probably makes the director a little nervous. But in the absence of identifying information, I'm afraid I don't see the problem, and neither does my friend with legal experience. 

 

It aspires to be a state-of-the-art centre. It's located in a well-off area, where the parents have a lot of technology at home. The centre has whizz-bang technology at every turn. I'd have expected progressive attitudes to use of the internet, reflected in policy and philosophy, in that social context.

But no; it's the attitudes of the director that have made the difference, I fear. You're only as whizz-bang as the person in charge, and so we'll have to look at her 'social history'. Someone who comes from an older generation, with many years of experience in centres running on old principles, who doesn't understand the positive power of blogging to create change in practice, who feels fearful and threatened by the openness of the internet, will tend to hold the centre back from being a truly functional part of the C21st.  And some of my readings for this course have suggested that, indeed, new curriculum is often held back by attitudes from the past; staff are indoctrinated to do things a certain way, and in the face of change they tend to cling to the familiar. 

So the distinction between a staff member sharing anecdotes from work with people at the pub (who no doubt know where one works and may know the families at the centre) and sharing anecdotes from work with colleagues who have a professional interest, anonymously, on a medium as huge as the internet may well be lost on those who cling to old attitudes. Social history kicks an own goal on that one. Internet stories are a more functional way of achieving active behavioural change in philosophy and practice than handing out copies of the EYLF to all staff.

Enough of that centre. Let's look at the social history of a contrasting centre, makeshift, ancient, tiny. It serves an old indigenous mission community and the locals of a small town.  The town has been a centre of racial unrest for many, many years. White people fight with black people, black people from one mob fight with black people from another mob. Alcohol and substance abuse is rife. Many children have developmental delay issues as a result. Also within the demographic are the children of highly respected indigenous elders, local townsfolk, graziers and farmers, many as bright as buttons.

The text of Kevin Rudd's apology is still posted in the window of a local shop. The country's past is a powerful influence on this town.

The childcare facility responds with high flexibility. The unspoken working philosophy is 'whatever works is right for today'. Sure, there's a sun-smart policy, but if an aboriginal child needs to be outside in the middle of the day because being inside is making him or her stir-crazy, then out they go. 

Cultural awareness is a high priority. Attendance policies are flexible.  Recognising the different understandings of time and priority between the cultures, the centre keeps places open for absent indigenous children for months at a time. Payment options are very flexible; the attitude is one of understanding rather than impatience.

Documentation policy has a relatively low priority. The children's safety and wellbeing requires constant supervision, as reflected in a high staff-child ratio, and taking your eyes off the children for long enough to write a learning story is generally impossible. 

What happens at this centre is unmistakably real and grounding; staff go home thinking not about how they best fulfilled policy and philosophy, but whether they met the needs of these individual children today and how they can do it better tomorrow. To some extent, the high demands of the demographic transcend policy in the presence of caring and capable staff.

The atmospheres in these two centres couldn't be more different. In one, there's a high awareness that one should follow policies and regulations to the letter and a low awareness of the true policy implications of embracing technological progress. In the other, the philosophy of flexibility leads the way and the social context makes technology all but irrelevant and policy implementation labile by necessity.

Social history has an impact, yes, but in some cases it's the social history of the centre- in others the social history of the people in power. Both are fierce forces upon policy and philosophy.

A short history of me

My next uni task is to talk about myself (never a difficult task <laughter>) and how my background has affected my professional attitudes . 

I have to answer some specific questions, like where did I grow up? I suspect I'm meant to give a straight answer to this, but I don't really do straight answers all that well. I prefer something a little closer to truth than to single-sentence simplicity. I'm a complex person.

I think they're asking where I lived as a child. As a child I lived in the far northern suburbs of Sydney- too far north to be called the North Shore, but close enough to those wondrously detached-from-reality streets to feel like the poor relation when I attended a private school a little further south. That was my physical location. But the actual words of the question say, where did I grow up? 

I grew up largely inside my own head, because I was confined indoors so much due to illness. I grew up in the world of books, imagination, arts and crafts, board games with my family and solitary play with my dolls or my mother's typewriter. And when I was let outdoors, I grew up walking with my father in the local bushland, or inhaling the view on my great-grandparents' riverside acres near Lake Macquarie, or fishing for yabbies in the creek at my grandparents' property on the Northern Tablelands. I grew up a city kid in my head and a country kid in my heart. I grew up as someone equally happy with a pen or an axe in my hands.

Note the absence of peer relationships.

My childhood? Was I ever a child, really? I suppose I must have been, though I spent a lot of my early years feeling like I was looking after the emotions of everyone around me- a singularly unchildlike characteristic. I particularly avoided displeasing my mother. She was a great mother. At some level I understood very early that it wasn't fair to give her a hard time, because she was so fair with me. 

Play? I played intellectual games with her and with my brother- Scrabble was a favourite, but we also wrote some screamingly funny stories which generally took the mickey out of my French grandmother's supply of 'penny dreadful' romantic novellas- and complex games with rules with my father and brother, such as Five Hundred and how to understand and write musical harmony.  Laughter was a constant companion to all of these except the music, which even then I recognised as somehow important and serious in my life. I remember disliking the competitive nature of chess, at which my brother excelled, and so I never took to it.  

I don't think many of my peers had that sort of childhood play. But I wouldn't really know, because- well, did you note the absence of peer relationships?

So culturally, I was something of a hothouse academic, insulated from the world of bikes and hopscotch and The Beatles (the radio was only ever tuned to the ABC station 2FC, which played a lot of classical music and hooked me on Brahms' 4th Symphony before I had a clue who he was). I never heard a pop song till I was 12, I never took part in team sport, I was never a Girl Guide. I was a girl in a bottle.

Education was valued like a rare jewel, because both my parents wished they'd had a better shot at it themselves. My brother and I both had IQs off the scale- we were tested early, due to our ridiculously precocious attainment of milestones and our peculiar lack of childishness in our manner- and were encouraged to turn the learning up to whatever level we wanted.  

We were poor, but we were never denied books; we were members of the local children's library- if I close my eyes I can still see and smell it- and both read voraciously, to the exclusion of other senses (one of the few times I remember my mother smacking me was when she thought I'd been kidnapped after calling me for lord knows how long without reply; I was sitting on the back steps, out of sight, completely engrossed in my 'Bobbsey Twins' book. I would have been 4 years old, at the most).  My brother and father again led the way in some outdoor activities, such as gaining an encyclopaedic knowledge of the insect world (I still have one of our old butterfly nets) and the botanical names of wildflowers.

I don't sound much like a typical child, do I?

I lived in a society where not everyone had a car or phone, the local grocer delivered to your door in a little green panel van with wooden trim, the baker and milkman turned up at our door, ice creams only came scooped into cones or as soft-serve from the Mr Whippy van, we walked to the station to 'go to town' (ie to the shops in the Sydney CBD- there were no suburban malls), everyone had a radio but not everyone had a TV (and if they did it was black and white), magazines like 'Women's Weekly' were delivered by post, toys were made of metal not plastic, and nobody gave a damn about saving water unless- like my grandparents- their only supply was from a tank.

So how does this socio-cultural background affect the way I think about children, teaching and the Early Childhood curriculum?

It makes me aware that children are often far more capable than we think. I set the bar higher than most and lower it only when I need to, rather than starting too low and risking losing the respect and interest of the most capable children. My awareness of the bright sparks in my rooms gives me a head start in crowd control, because sure as eggs, it'll be the bored bright child at the centre of any ruckus.

I love the interest-based curriculum, because I acknowledge that it used to drive me mad to be restricted to what other children were interested in or could do; treating children as individuals is important to me, because I was so different from other children myself.

It makes me good at scaffolding and extension, because I had such good Vygotskian role models in my parents. My parents and my brother were always there to feed me some more information, or brainstorm another method, or add a new material to my resources. I try to do the same for my children, and I'm better than most at spotting an opening for scaffolding or extension because I've seen it done all my life.

It makes me aware of the importance of childhood connection to the natural world, because I was, for example, taught to turn off the tap by my father, who was taught the same by his tank-reliant parents. I still have a deep connection to the bush after all those years of walking and playing there; it shapes my sanity and is a vital emotional resource as well as a physical one. How many children have I helped to overcome a fear of spiders by letting one crawl across my hand and showing them how you can get it off you if you want, by knowing that it always crawls upwards? 

It makes me a walking advertisement for the fact that girls can do pretty much anything boys can do. Unfortunately, it also tends to make me a bit irritable about the 'pretty princess in pink' sort of little girl, and I really have to try hard to connect with these children. I'm drawn to the boys and the tomboys. I have to work hard on instilling self-belief and resilience in over-protected little girls. That's one of my challenges.

My other big challenge, thanks to my background, is getting on with my own peers. I never have a moment's difficulty getting on with the children- far from it. But my colleagues? Honestly, sometimes I think I have mild Aspergers, because I'm so bad at reading them- I never have a clue what they're really thinking about anything- but maybe it's just that I missed out on peer interaction when I was a kid. So that's something else that's a work in progress. I got too used to talking with my family, who were brilliant, insightful and totally on my wavelength. Now I don't even recognise when a relative stranger's not on the same page, so my self-belief ends up making me tread on toes. How on earth do I teach myself that, at this stage of my life? 

That difficulty of mine makes me aware of the importance of letting children work it out, socially. As an adult, I'll prevent fisticuffs, but I won't prevent conflict- just scaffold it a bit if they're stuck. 

And I encourage social play, because heaven knows it's cost me to miss out on it myself.

Hurdles of hypocrisy

Okay, now I'm getting seriously pissed, and I'm not just talking about the gin and tonic in my hand.

Surely the whole modern thrust of education, at any level, is about recognising the individual? And yet the university courses themselves are lumping us into random groups, where we are forced to depend on each other's skill or foibles rather than on our own unique and individual ability. A few weeks in, and it's just as I feared. The others are dragging me down.

No, I can't work at my own pace. I have to wait for every other student in my group to get their acts together and find time in their busy lives to do their uni work... so that we can then all race the clock at the last minute to get our own submissions ready on time.  Wow, let's even out the demographic with a measure of stress! That sounds fair! (removes tongue from cheek with tyre iron)

Now, believe me, I'm not standing in judgement on other students who are struggling to follow the time line and have a million conflicting responsibilities to juggle; it's not their fault, it's the system that sucks. Because hello, I also have a million conflicting responsibilities, and the way they fall for me makes it a little idiotic (okay, a LOT idiotic) to leave things to the last gasp.  Sample: as of next week I plunge headlong into four weeks of 11-hour days (and that's before I deal with minor little things like shopping, cooking and looking after my share of the farm duties), and I'm not going to be exactly spoiled for choice about how much time I spend on academia.

Here I am, trying to do the responsible thing like a grown-up (after years and years of leaving everything to the last minute while I was at school) and plan ahead. But no; we're working in groups. I have to wait for everyone else to be ready. I'm just considered impatient. No girl scouts allowed; be unprepared!

So of course, the moment someone else posted something to my group in another subject (a full two weeks after me) I fell upon it with joy and went to work 'helping'. Great result; I have already had my wrist slapped for failing to observe the niceties of working in a group.

Here are the rules, as I've perceived them (retrospectively):


Make academic comments only, but don't cross-reference to other courses regardless of relevance. Each course is a discrete entity. (well, there's some up-to-date educational theory...)

Comment on as many minor tasks as possible on the forums, regardless of how superficial your comments might be. LOOK BUSY! (pass me my brown paper bag)

Above all, don't be honest about anyone else's academic standards, not even to help them improve their work. The only way to improve others' work is through referencing. (uncrosses eyes, uncrosses t's and undots i's)

Alright, I will now stop taking the piss, despite feeling so pissed, and get back to the story. Apparently what we're meant to be doing is giving each other a leg-up by helpfully pointing out references to support each other's personal writings. I might add that so far I'd gained absolutely nothing from this, as nobody had commented on my work at all.  But what I saw in the post brought out the teacher in me; it made me see the individual fellow student struggling with that assignment.

Okay, I went beyond my brief in the letter of the law, but I did NOT go beyond my brief as an educator. I decided to use what I'm 'learning' in this academic literacy course to help her get on task, answer the question and write using acceptable sentence structure, because there were some serious problems in her work that were just going to get more problematic as she 'developed' it if someone didn't give her a nudge.  It was not the student's fault for not listening in grammar class, either; English is her second language, and I tried to help her come up to standard.

NOT APPROPRIATE!

Oh dear. Apparently I was far too honest.  And apparently this isn't my job. I have to remember that I'm a student, not a teacher.

Oh, for crying out loud... here we are acknowledging that children can teach each other, that children can even teach US, their teachers, but I'm not allowed to teach my fellow students? I've been helping uni students sort their work like this for years.

The difference, I guess, is that those students chose to have me help them. This student was forced under my nose, and so I did what came naturally and tried to teach her how to pass from first principles (yes, the word 'irrelevant' was used) instead of sticking to the given task (which was to prop up her work with references, regardless of how dubious her starting point may have been).

So much for helping people. Good on you, uni, for demanding I be less caring and assuming I have nothing useful to offer beyond what's dictated to me.

And so I will do as others do, and produce a string of false praise (to be politically correct, because we're supposed to be nice to each other), vaguely relevant references and, no doubt, hypocritical 'thank yous' for what they write on my own work. It's more than depressing. It's completely counter-intuitive, it's insulting to who I am and it makes me want to quit the course.

I don't think that's what I'm meant to be experiencing. I don't think that's what I'm paying rather a lot of money to gain. And I don't think sitting here losing sleep over it is particularly helpful to me as an early childhood educator, either. God, how I hate hypocrisy.

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.