Four freedoms II

In my last post I illustrated Trevor Pateman’s theories of teaching and learning with a Lion King-themed meme sequence. At tonight’s stella 2.0 workshop I continued reflecting on his radical notion that teachers should model the whole thinking process for their students, including suspicion, doubt and not-knowing. According to Pateman (cited by Boomer), teachers should: question an unreasonable assertion; say that we don’t understand if we don’t understand; pause to think; say that we don’t know if we don’t know. I took these in turn.

PAUSE TO THINK. What happens when a teacher pauses to think? In a culture of care and surveillance this seems like a risk. Look out the window and you’ve turned your back on the class. But anything’s better than not looking out the window.

SAY THAT WE DON’T KNOW. Euphemisms for I don’t know: I’ll get back to you; this can be a research project; let’s stay on task; does anyone else know the answer; that reminds me; which leads us back to the main idea; let’s hear from some other people; it’s time to work independently; quiet.

SAY THAT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND. My mother taught me two cliches: “you’re not late until you arrive late” and “people just want to hear I understand.” Teachers modelling confusion seems rare enough to be a taboo, but I do some of my best thinking when my friends make a perplexed expression. The blanker they look, the better I talk.

QUESTION AN UNREASONABLE ASSERTION. Assertions worth questioning: that English should be interesting; that English is dull; that Shakespeare is great; that Shakespeare is unreadable; that one person should speak at a time; that we should face the front; that we should pull up our socks; that we should wear socks; that a rule must have consequences; that consequences can be predicted; that the lesson is over.

Four freedoms

This meme sequence [click to enlarge] is my written contribution to this evening’s stella 2.0 workshop at the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English. Pateman’s insights are from his 1975 book Language, Truth and Politics cited by Garth Boomer in this article.

Multimodal

“We’ll start with the more traditional approaches,” he said, meaning pens and keyboards. The rhetoric of multimodal texts was projected into the future, the always-deferred.

I’m writing this in ink, on acid-free paper. Beside me, a glass of wine and two film-ready devices. I’m thinking about my blog: how will this read on a screen? What image shall I use?

People settle down. Soon there’s only one conversation, between the presenter and the woman who asked the awkward question. I recall being impressed by how calmly it was resolved. These are teachers of English, but it’s not an English class.

“Is anyone pretending to write?” asks the presenter. “Yeah, me too,” he answers himself. Other than that, it’s just the sound of typing and the coffee machine. Plus something humming overhead – looks like central heating but it’s audio gone rogue.

Someone on Twitter watches through the webcam. “Writing’s not a spectator sport,” he says, interpreted by the presenter. I wave at the camera, but only after tweeting about it. It’s like I’m reading my own script.

They’re calling this “2.0.” Earlier, we were welcomed by elders from version 1. They’re still here, typing on Macbooks, using the language of the Uniting Church. “Fourteen years ago, we started a conversation.” The year I finished high-school.

My phone vibrates, calmly. It’s my partner in Nanjing, via WeChat. He’s found a place.

This post was completed at a professional writing workshop at the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English; crossposted at stella 2.0.

Ekphrasis II

Last week I co-presented a Thursday Talk on ekphrasis at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. Hagan and I were just finalising our collaboration when someone said “Tim Jones”; and, sure enough, there he was, the artist of the piece we’d written poems about, ready to fold out a gallery chair.

It was heartening to see others interested in the possibilities that art shows to students of English. The group responded warmly to our poems, but took the discussion much further, asking about how we encourage different types of students (boys and girls; extroverts and introverts) to develop and express their love of poetry.

I’ve described ekphrasis itself over here. At the event, I wondered about the technique’s success, proposing that poetry might help overcome the awkwardness of talking about art. Even when I’m with close friends I find it difficult to verbalise any response to an artwork. When I’m deeply moved, language falls short until it’s a poem. Exercises like this also make potential real. Instead of projecting words into our future (the things we’ll say; the books we’ll write) we kneel down on the floor with sticky notes, arranging words that are already written, further completing an artwork.

“Can you send me your poem?” asked the artist, afterwards. This was already heaven; but then he said “I’m really glad you’re a teacher.”

Podcasted!

Exciting development: the podcast of Tuesday’s Cherchez la Femme panel has been published: here. In it, you’ll hear a couple of hours of me, Karen Pickering, Madeleine Crofts and Stephanie Rogers discussing feminism and teaching.

Listening back, I’m amazed by how quickly I’ve sponged up educational theory. “Education theory backs this up,” I say at 35:20 or so, as if I knew what I was on about. “This is actually the way that students genuinely learn and their minds actually change.”

Other things to listen out for include Madeleine at 44:05, on teaching by not being an expert [“I tell them that all the time. ‘I don’t know everything and I make mistakes all the time. Same as you. We’re pretty much the same. Like, I know a little bit more than you, but not much.'”]; Karen at 1:02:55, on not quashing comedy in classrooms [“I think that creating environments where teachers get the joke sometimes and trust kids to handle comedy and humour between themselves is a really vital kind of dimension of trust”]; and Stephanie at 1:23:45 [sic], on the gendered dynamics of parent-teacher relationships [“I could not think of a single male who’s copped it from a parent.”].

It was a great night. Enjoy the podcast and see you in the audience for next month’s Cherchez la Femme.

Feminism and teaching

A dream came true when Karen invited me to join her monthly Cherchez la Femme panel. Last night we met at the pub to talk about feminism and teaching.

We started with our favourite teachers: the one who cheered us on, the one who threw a duster, the one who wrote back. I talked about Mrs Reece, my beloved history teacher who instructed me to teach history: “Not in high school,” she’d said.

As always, Karen beckoned the conversation to thoughtful places, wondering if the standards to which teachers are so energetically held are informed by the majority sex of the profession. Also, it’s true that gender inequality exists among teachers, but why is this imbued with more significance than in male-dominated jobs? Modelling was mentioned a lot (thanks Bandura!), and I challenged the panic around students in Australia needing more male role models. Aren’t there enough powerful blokes in roles to which boys can aspire?

After the break I had an English-teacher moment, naming the authors of texts on the New South Wales prescribed list for year twelve students. I’d seen it in an article set for my course, whose writer seemed impressed by the scope of the list. “I would argue that the examination serves the subject well,” Annette Patterson wrote, “in that it provides a range of different genres and a wide choice of text.” Well there’s poetry, drama, film, nonfiction and fiction texts, but they’re mostly made by men [novels by Mark, Orson, J.G., Henry, Robert, Amin, Scott – and Jane; films by Phillip, Robert, Roberto, Baz, Peter – and Stephen]. Of course there are strategies for teaching any material as a feminist, but it’d assist students of all sexes if the material wasn’t so sexually monotone.

Warm thanks to Karen Pickering, Madeleine Crofts and Stephanie Rogers for the discussion, to Ron Killeen for sound and photography, and the audience for its thoughtful questions and good cheer. The night was recorded; I’ll post a link to the podcast when it’s done.