This week we did a practice Edcamp, in which a small group of colleagues and I essentially brainstormed ways to engage students in cross-curricular learning. The idea that intrigued me most was the possibility of merging theatre, specifically Theatre of the Oppressed workshops, with virtually any other subject.
I have extensive experience with Theatre of the Oppressed as an actor. In this format, actors perform scenes in front of an audience of learners. In each scene, something goes significantly wrong. After performing it once, the actors repeat the scene, but with audience members having the option of yelling “STOP” to pause the scene, then replacing one of the actors and doin things differently to fix what went wrong. After that, the director leads a brief discussion of the person’s change to the scene and how it worked or didn’t, and they do the scene a few more times to allow other audience members to suggest other remedies.
As an example, I have created a Theatre of the Oppressed scene to teach about experimental design in science. See If you can come up with anything that could be done better!
In this class, we had a special guest speaker: Jeff Hopkins from the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). PSII is an independent school located in downtown Victoria that uses an integrated approach to subjects and tries to help students create a more self-directed and customized educational path. In doing so, they often get students to pursue more hands-on projects and more interaction and partnership with the community than they would experience in a traditional public school.
What impresses me most about PSII is the goal of “making itself obsolete”, which Jeff has stated clearly and emphatically. His ultimate goal for the school would be to have the approach prove so successful that the philosophy and approach become mainstream and get adopted by the public school system. Also, the integrated, community-based project-heavy approach may work very well for certain outgoing, highly self-motivated students with the right attitude.
However, I do have a few concerns: one is that it requires a lot of energy an cooperation from families and community members. This could be a positive aspect, developing students’ connection to people, businesses and organizations within the community, but it may also create unfair advantage for students who come from less supportive backgrounds and, if implemented on a wider scale, exhaust intangible resources like engagement from local business. It also may very well be the case that not all students are equally well-suited to this approach, which ties into another concern: evaluation of its effectiveness. Even if you have data demonstrating a high level of post-graduation achievement for PSII students, that must be taken with a huge grain of salt, because there is an enormous selection bias for an independent school like this in favour of students who are well-suited to the model and have parents and families that are more engaged than average and probably less likely to have low incomes, low education levels, and other factors that often contribute to the trouble that some students have in the public system. Also, especially when you define learning in more intangible ways as PSII does, it can be hard to measure:
This week, we looked at multimedia learning theory, including the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition) Model. I found this model to be a very interesting framework for analyzing the ways that technology can serve functions in our classroom (or virtual classroom) settings. I particularly liked seeing these four components as a spectrum rather than a hierarchy: at first glance, for example, substitution may seem inferior to augmentation, but under the right circumstances it can be tremendously useful. For example, there may be a particular medium that is inaccessible for certain learners for whom other media, though not inherently functionally superior, may be far more effective.
We also learned a little about video and audio editing. This is something that I have a fair amount of background in, from making a student film in 2002 that was shown at the Capital 6 theatre as part of the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival, to helping with artist friends’ video projects today, I have enjoyed this type of task immensely and developed a great appreciation for how much the widely available technology has improved over the past few decades. I look forward to making use of this technology, and my experience with it, in my future pedagogy and lesson preparation.
This week, we explored what it means to be a good citizen online, including both how we treat others (e.g. obtaining consent before sharing information and images of others or avoiding/preventing bullying behaviour) and how we protect ourselves (e.g. safety, privacy and evaluating information through an appropriately critical lens). One of the issues that I am particularly passionate about sharing with my future students is how to navigate all of the misinformation of the information age: what is or is not good science, reliable sources, or legitimate journalism?
In terms of my own web presence and privacy, I have severely limited my options by life choices I started making a long time ago: I became a performer. After over two decades of being an actor, singer, and comedian, thousands of (mostly local; I’m not very famous) people I don’t know personally may know who I am or know certain things about me. I have some presence on hundreds of web pages, including video of me performing my own material:
I am still far from the most famous “Evan Roberts” on the internet (I didn’t actually start the Welsh Christian Revival of 1904; that was a different guy) but I certainly don’t have the option of being diligent about my own privacy anymore. Oh well, it’s a small price to pay for that one time I got free Italian sodas for me and my then girlfriend because the bartender at Peacock Billiards recognized me as Prospero from The Tempest.
This week, we explored an assortment of online resources, including Trello, Twitter, Tweetdeck, Feedly, Diigo and Hypothesis. I have limited experience with Twitter, and no experience with any of the others. I am still very cognizant of the impact that Twitter has had on accountability for one’s beliefs and communication in our culture, due to numerous high profile controversies involving celebrities getting in trouble for old tweets. Teachers are vulnerable to the same phenomenon on a smaller scale, and should aspire to make sure they only post statements that they would be happy for anyone to see on a medium that anyone can see.
In addition to appropriateness and social acceptability of content, people posting content on the internet needs to be cognizant of intellectual property law. On that note, we watched a film called RiP! A Remix Manifesto. This documentary looked at copyright law and how it impacts new technologies for creating and distributing media. A great deal of the issues dealt with on this film are reminiscent of the economic concepts of value creation and value capture. The Internet has made value creation far easier and more efficient, particularly as it relates to the distribution of media. People now have far larger libraries of music than they did during the age of the physical album, usually at a much lower cost. However, tremendous legal issues have arisen regarding who should reap the benefits of these improvements, and how.
This week, we learned about starting and keeping blogs. This is something with which I had little prior experience, so I knew that getting into the habit of multiple weekly blog posts (for multiple classes) would be potentially difficult, especially while balancing single parenthood and my stage production for the first five weeks of the semester.
The video Most Likely to Succeed was about a school (High Tech High, a Charter School in San Diego, California) that was abandoning the traditional, didactic and academic approach to teaching in favour of a more hands-on, technology-heavy and project-based approach. Although the documentary did raise some interesting points about how potentially out of date traditional learning is, I really felt that promoting a charter school as an alternative to conventional public school should be viewed in context as a potential attempt to erode confidence in public education, thereby exacerbating the USA’s already huge class/income-based access disparity.
So far, I have been fairly impressed with both the quantity and quality of tech resources available for educators. As someone who graduated high school in a different millennium, I had a very different experience from what students have with technology today. When I was in school, technological enhancement of learning consisted of a video displayed on a VHS trolley that took the teacher an average of 7 minutes to figure out. I look forward to learning more about all the tools I could have in my teacher’s toolkit!
As one of the older students in my Post-Degree program, I am sure I had a very different experience from most of my classmates with learning English Language Arts in High School, and that the difference is even bigger when compared to the curriculum currently taught in BC High Schools:
In stark contrast to today’s emphasis on multiliteracy and student-centred learning, my education in ELA was almost entirely through the conventional didactic approach, with less emphasis on:
Additionally, we simply took English 10, 11, and 12, with no trace of the specialization offered now:
So, what did we do in our traditional, didactic English classes?
Our classes were a blend of grammar, vocabulary, and writing technique mixed with literary analysis. For English, our mark was usually heavily weighted toward essays over any other format of evaluation. We did occasionally do presentations and group projects, but they were few and far between.
Overall, it seems that the past few decades have seen a shift away from heavy reliance on behavioural learning and toward other approaches:
Cognitive:
“Respond to text in personal, creative, and critical ways”
Student-centred approach
“Transform ideas and information to create original texts”
“Express an opinion and support it with credible evidence”
Social Constructivist Learning Theory
Emphasis on Social and collaborative learning
“Recognize and appreciate how different features, forms, and genres of texts reflect different purposes, audiences, and messages”
“Exchange ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking”
“Texts are socially, culturally, and historically constructed.”
Overall, I am fairly impressed with the direction that ELA education has taken since my experience of it in the 1990s. Incorporating the internet and increasingly advanced computer technology that students will have available to them in their post-secondary education, career and/or daily lives seems like an obvious and essential choice.
In terms of approaches and techniques associated with different theories of learning, I do believe in retaining some elements of a more traditional, didactic and behavioural approach:
Focus on grammar, structure and proper word usage: not only does this have the potential to lead to clarity and professionalism in future communication, it also lays the groundwork for a richer internal intellectual experience, as any thoughts we have beyond basic urges and emotions are constructed with the language we know well.
Focus on observable evidence of learning: Our responsibility as educators is not just to teach in the hopes that our students will learn, but also to evaluate and monitor their learning progress so we can adapt how we are teaching them on an ongoing basis. Being able to execute specific, observable and measurable behaviors like spelling words correctly and writing coherent paragraphs are key indicators that a student has made enough progress to move on to more complicated and advanced content.
However, I am also excited to incorporate into my teaching some of the cognitive and social constructionist elements that had little to no presence in my own high school English education:
Greater emphasis on creativity and personal response to text: this will allow students to adapt to a society and economy that is changing far more rapidly now than it was when I was their age.
Greater emphasis on indigenous perspectives: this is not only essential for accommodating, honouring and de-marginalizing indigenous students, it also helps non-indigenous students become better citizens and appreciate the historical context that made Canada what it is today.
Understanding the historical and social context of both texts and their audiences: This will allow students to have a broader understanding of the impact that texts have on the world, and to perform better on any educational or career path related to the social sciences.
Now is an exciting time to be a teacher, with a convergence of technology and theory the likes of which the profession has never seen before. I look forward to making the most of all we have to choose from!
