Ngrams

Today I discovered the joy of the Ngram. When you search for a word on Google, a wealth of information is provided, including, in the drop down box, an "Ngram" graphing the percentage use of that word in all books scanned by google.

For example, if you search for: "define curriculum"...you get:

1. curriculum

   kʌˈrɪkjʊləm/

   noun

   1. 1.

      the subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college.

      "course components of the school curriculum"

      synonyms:

      syllabus, course of study/studies, programme of study/studies,educational programme, subjects, modules; More

   

   
   

   Choose languageAfrikaansAlbanianArabicArmenianAzerbaijaniBasqueBelarusianBengaliBosnianBulgarianCatalanCebuanoChinese (Simplified)Chinese (Traditional)CroatianCzechDanishDutchEsperantoEstonianFilipinoFinnishFrenchGalicianGeorgianGermanGreekGujaratiHaitianHebrewHindiHmongHungarianIcelandicIndonesianIrishItalianJapaneseJavaneseKannadaKhmerKoreanLaoLatinLatvianLithuanianMacedonianMalayMalteseMarathiNorwegianPersianPolishPortugueseRomanianRussianSerbianSlovakSlovenianSpanishSwahiliSwedishTamilTeluguThaiTurkishUkrainianUrduVietnameseWelshYiddish

   

...and the option to open a pull-down box below. When you do this, the fun begins. The Ngram can be adjusted for different dates or words and instantly gives a picture of how the uses of different terms have become more or less popular in the books Google scans over time. 

How reliable this information is depends on how broad a spectrum of books Google has scanned and that's something I'm yet to discover. I need to google it.

Here's an Ngram as a demonstration. You can have hours of fun exploring neologisms or comparing the rise and fall of society's interests - at least to the extent that our cultural foci are represented in books and in the books that Google has scanned.

Curriculum as Dialectic rather than Linear narrative.

UWCSEA is doing interesting curriculum work at the moment. In an attempt to clearly articulate our beliefs about learning and our understandings about how best to address the school's mission statement we are rewriting our curriculum.

At a purely pragmatic level, this might seem foolish. The thousands of hours spent exploring other curricula and negotiating our own understandings could be avoided were we simply to choose a well-established program from outside the school. ACARA's new Australian curriculum, for example, is based on years of academic discussion overlayed with extensive professional consultation and a rigorous validation and review process. What ACARA (or Common Core in the USA or the UK National Curriculum or any of a large number of other national or international curricula) provide to schools is a carefully considered package for teaching and learning. These curricula are valid and reliable and provide a level of credibility in the eyes of the community that allows teachers to get on with the practice of teaching knowing that they have easy answers to questions like "why do you teach that?" Answer: "because it is in the curriculum."

What I am discovering through being part of the UWCSEA Curriculum Articulation process, is that "because it's in the curriculum" is not a good enough answer. If you teach something because someone else told you to, then you are missing out on one of the most interesting, rewarding and, I would like to argue, vital pieces of the learning jigsaw.

The curriculum we are articulating at UWCSEA will not be as well-considered as the Australian Curriculum or Common Core or the UK National Curriculum. It can't be. As I sit with my colleagues exploring and discussing what learning looks like in the English curriculum (the area where I have been most focussed), I am very aware that our discussions are compromises and approximations. We borrow and build on other curricula and adapt them to our own context but we are constantly reaching points where we say "I'm not sure, this looks like the best answer at the moment and we will need to see how it works with students and make adaptations as we review the curriculum in its implementation." There are only 6 or 8 of us sitting around the table when we nut out the English curriculum and we lack the massive resources available to governments as they do similar work. But we have something very special available to us that governments do not: we are both designing and implementing what we have designed. Our answers to the question "why do you teach that?" will never be "because it's in the curriculum."

In the end what I think matters most is not so much the curriculum we are building as it is the relationship we will have to it. Building a curriculum requires a demanding re-assessment of the purpose and structure of each of its constituent disciplines. Before even this happens, it requires a demanding assessment of the very purpose and structure of teaching and this in turn requires a thoughtful reassessment of the purpose and structure of the school. In each of these processes, the relationship between the curriculum and the school community has changed. Each re-engagement with purpose and structure has breathed a little more life into our curriculum and moved it a little further from being a linear document that instructs, towards becoming a dialectic that engages.

Building Agency

"Thought bubbles"
 Some rights reserved by Michael Taggart Photography

We know that it is difficult to disentangle the relationship between structure and agency. The way the structures of society and the agency of individuals build on each other is an ongoing arena of debate in Sociology. And whilst there is significant disagreement about what the relationship between these elements might be, a common theme amongst theorists from Max Weber to Anthony Giddens is that the structures of society serve to limit the agency of some individuals more than others. Crucially, education plays a particular role in this process; the sociologist Basil Bernstein argued that the rules and "codes" of education which are implicit in curriculum and pedagogy often serve to close rather than open doors into an individual's future.

When children fail at school, drop out, repeat, they are likely to be positioned in a factual world tied to simple operations, where knowledge is impermeable. The successful have access to the general principle, and some of these – a small number who are going to produce the discourse – will become aware that the mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence, the possibility of the unthinkable. But the long socialization into the pedagogic code can remove the danger of the unthinkable, and of alternative realities. (Bernstein, 1996, p.26)

In the context of UWCSEA's curriculum articulation, what speaks powerfully to me in this formulation is the dichotomy Bernstein describes between an understanding of knowledge as either impermeable or permeable - as a vessel in which the agency of the individual remains trapped or as a colander through which agency can filter and reform.

Too often education reform focuses only on the detail of curricula rather than recognising the important work of deliberately and strategically nurturing the agency of those who will be bringing curriculum to life in the classroom. Those of us who have been given the rare opportunity to reflect on the structure of our disciplines through the Curriculum Articulation process go into our classrooms armed with the most important of all understandings: we know what it's like to wrestle with the structures of knowledge and we can model this to our students. Critically, we know that the foundations of our knowledge are not fixed and nor are they easily categorised and labelled. Our knowledge is permeable and could be described differently. We have less certainty and more awe and this is what I think our students need if they are to take responsibility for achieving the UWCSEA Educational Goal to "shape a better world."

My students and I are privileged to have behind us the courage of a community which is prepared to take the brave and dangerous step into a world of the 'unthinkable, and of alternative realities.'

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very simple prose with some hints of poetry and an artfully polished narrative that shines and shines until it is blinding. The moral dilemma of the novel is built in layers that remind us that good and bad are often neither simple nor self-evident. Stedman tells the story of Tom, a survivor of WWI and a good man who, as a civilian, must make choices as morally complex as those he made in the trenches. A compelling read.

View all my reviews

Playing chess with my son

License

 Some rights reserved by cyanocorax

Each of these pieces 
Has its own story: 
One of moves made
At the hands of
Father or son or 
Grandfather who 
Offered them as a 
Gift one Christmas
To his Grandson.

Knowing he had not
Long to live
He took them from
A dusty shelf and 
Repainted those that
Were black
And revarnished
Those that were white.

Illness and age left paint
Where it
Should not be
Adding ambiguity
To our play -

The predictable patterns
of a timeless game
Knocked slightly askew. 

The pen is mightier than the sword but equally blunt

I apologise for these
Words which I wield
With so little dexterity.
They have on them

 Some rights reserved by giltay

The fingermarks of
The women and men
Who came before -
Some more skilled,
Others less, but
Each blunting the
Blade in their
Frantic slashings
At the world.

How to find the
Whetting stone
To hone an edge
Sharp enough to
Cut to the bone?

Two weeks in New York - finding "rosebud".

Statue of Liberty being photographed
from the Staten Island Ferry

The flight from New York home to Singapore takes a bit less than 24 hours including a couple of hours to change planes in Tokyo - hours and hours sitting 10 kilometres above the earth’s surface with a few centimetres of aeronautical engineering between the bodies within and the minus 60 degree, very thin air outside.

Somewhere above the arctic circle, I started watching Orson Welles’ 1940s Hollywood classic, Citizen Kane. It seemed the right film to be watching in that strange space between cultures and time zones. As I sat endlessly in a darkened airplane and reflected on my two weeks in New York, Welles spoke of something essential about the American psyche.

A frame for understanding.

Looking at the Empire State from on top of the Rockefeller
Building

Citizen Kane is set in early 20^th century America and tells the story of a billionaire newspaper magnate who builds a mansion which he fills with the greatest art he can find from across the world. Kane could be read as representing any one of the industrial barons who built New York. This is a city of the most astounding monolithic buildings filled with the most remarkable collections of (mostly European) art. It is a city of excess and extreme that astounds, but it is also a city of contradictions and complexities. Welles makes use of a clever device to explore the motivations of Kane: he sets the film after Kane’s death and the plot follows the explorations of a newspaper journalist who is trying to discover the meaning of Kane’s final dying word: “rosebud”. The meaning of this word remains largely enigmatic in the film. What is clever and powerful about Welles’ plot, however, is that in piecing together the various stories about Kane, the viewer is left not with one simple answer, but with a complex and contradictory image of Kane which is paradoxically credible.

And that is what I feel about New York. It would be relatively easy to write about the desire of the nouveau riche to build monolithic phallic objects as symbols of power and insecurity or of the oedipal struggle of a young and powerful nation to establish its credibility in the eyes of Mother France and Father England, but this would be to neglect the beauty and humanity that is also a part of this paradoxical place. What struck me about NewYork is that it is both Wall Street and the United Nations Headquarters; both consumer excess and Central Park; both Broadway cliche and cutting edge drama at the Lincoln Center; both the smell of mould in my room at the YMCA and the beauty of the Y's 19th Century facade. New York, like “Rosebud”, seems to me to be an enigma: richly rewarding those who choose to explore but built in layers of contrasting colours and defying any simple explanation.

Manhattan framed through the dirt and fingermarks of travelers on
the Staten Island Ferry 

Windows and Mirrors

What always fascinates me as I photograph something that has been photographed thousands and probably millions of times before, is how my vision might be different from those many others. I am increasingly interested in taking photos of others taking photos. The reflections and refractions of meaning as images pass through the filters of different minds intrigue me. I wrote about this on the day that I went to visit the DIA gallery at Beacon, an hour and a half north of New York by train. Before visiting the gallery, I walked to the top of Mt Beacon and found myself reflecting on the issue of meaning and perspective that seems so particularly salient when one is travelling.

 Making meaning 

The tree in front of me

Is on a mountain

In New York State

View of the Hudson river from Mt Beacon

But the pen I’m

Writing with was

Made in Germany

And the fingers

Guiding it were

Made in Australia

And the language

Describing it was

Made in England

Where were you made?

And in what realm

Shall we locate this

Tree we have made

Together?

DIA Beacon was a revelation. Here the frame was an old 19^th century factory which seemed as integral to the process of making meaning as the objects it housed. The generosity of space offered to the art works was an important part of how I viewed them. I was reminded of the difference between seeing an animal in a zoo and watching one running in the wild. 


The works of Gerhard Richter had a particular resonance as they explored the possibility of art - and photography particularly - to be understood through either the metaphor of a mirror or a window. These massive translucent panels reflected the spaces around them each at a slightly different angle.

Richard Serra's work also stood out. It reminded me of the work of my Melbourne friend Mark Friedlander with its focus on angles and architecture.

Finding Rosebud

The last word on frames and meaning can go to this character. I met him down on West 34th street on my way to watch the 4th of July fireworks. In the middle of telling me where I might get a good vantage point, he suddenly jumped to attention and pointed to five national guard helicopters flying in formation behind me:

"Would you look at that! I'm gonna shoot the bastards"

And he picked up his old video camera and began.






You can find a link to my photos of New York here.

Cultural Foundations of Learning

I've just been reading a fascinating book recommended to me by our librarian: Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West (2012) by Jin Li, Associate Professor of Education and Human Development at Brown University.


The book really stirred me up (as a good book should); below is the email I sent to my librarian. I feel very pretentious making such broad statements in response to such a well-researched and argued book, but I also feel my response is an important one. In the school where I teach, the need to account appropriately for differing cultural perspectives on learning is incredibly important, not just because we want to teach our students well, but also because the ethos of the school is grounded in a belief that we must respect diverse cultures and explore what it means to make a better world for all cultures.


Here are my thoughts:

I found the ideas and arguments fascinating and - for me as a Western reader - very useful as I learn more about teaching students from an Eastern cultural background.

The problem for me is that the book grounds its explanations entirely in ancient philosophy and has nothing to say about modern sociology. The influences on modern Western education stop, according to Jin Li, with Kant. There is no discussion of Max Weber and the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic, for example, and little discussion of the impact of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. The general argument about a difference between East and West in education is convincing but grounding the causes predominantly in ancient philosophy leads to the potential to miss the impact of industrialisation on education. In the West, industrialisation has been a 200 year process which has had a dramatic impact on society, family and education (which has been famously slow to catch up). In China, this same process has happened largely in one life-time. Families and culture are different in the East and West as much because of a variation in the modern history of the countries (including the repression of industrialisation in the East as a result of Western colonisation). I would contend that if you compared education in the East and West 200 years ago, the similarities would be much more striking (even given that Jin Li's differences would still be noticeable and important). 

Why I think my framing of the differences is important is that Jin Li's account suggests that cultural differences are central, axiomatic and immutable. If, as I am suggesting, the differences are as much grounded in a differing rate of acceleration through the processes of transition from agrarian to post-industrial economies, then we would expect that education practices in Eastern society are likely to change. As teachers, supporting that change isn't disrespectful to the cultural traditions of the East, it is important to preparing all our students for the world of the future.

Cheers,
Ian

ReVision

 Some rights reserved by artnoose

Time Knots.
Filtered through

The pores of vision,

Twisted through with the

Obscurity of reason,

The certainties

Give way.

Seen again,

Filtered through

The pores of time,

Combed through with the

Clarity of hindsight,

The knots

Give way.



I've been reading Bonnie Campbell Hill and Carrie Ekey's book on Enhancing Writing Instruction and came across this lovely paragraph:

My favorite part of the writing process is revision. I start with a section that feels as messy and tangled as my hair in the morning. By the time I've reread and rewritten a section over and over, all the knots have been untangled, the frizzies tamed, and my writing finally feels smooth. The key is rereading. I read sections over and over tweaking here and there until they feel right... (p29)

The second stanza of the poem found its form fairly quickly. Originally the first stanza was to have been itself a muddled version of the second but it didn't really work for me. Ironically, this was the part of the poem that I struggled with most as I drafted and redrafted looking for a form and meaning that I could balance with the ending.

Reader-response

 Some rights reserved by digitalkatie

This space I provide
For meaning
Is bounded by a
Few unimaginative
Words and
A donkey.

Make of it what you
Will.

Ligature - that which ties you

The things that bind us are many and varied. Ties to family, to culture, to faith and to conviction keep us upright and braced against the vagaries of fate. Equally, however, our ties may hold us fast and prevent us from moving with the times even when change would be for the best.

Many years ago (I find myself writing that line more and more), my friend Peter Lenten and I designed a social studies unit on religion. For years we had been taking students to visit a mosque and a church and a synagogue. It occurred to us that, whilst these were important places for our students to keep visiting, few of our students would feel any personal connection with these religions. In fact, in a largely secular school, few of our students had much of a tie to conventional religion at all.

Peter had studied divinity many years before my many-years-ago and he explained that one etymology of the word "religion" is from the same Latin root as "ligature": historically "religion" has a sense of meaning "that which you are tied to". We decided to add one more place of worship into our tour and so took students to the largest shopping mall in our city. What we were interested in helping students explore was the way humans find meaning in their lives and the way that consumerism fills a defining space in the lives of many secular identities.

 Some rights reserved by xiquinhosilva

Shopping malls, like churches and mosques and temples of many creeds and colours, can be inspiring places. As a young traveller I visited St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and stood, neck straining and head stretched, looking in awe up at the vastness of the dome. It was an inspiring experience. Despite my ambivalence about religion and the tensions I felt about the wealth represented in the Vatican, I was inspired by the sense of grandeur and the enormity of the space. This also is a feeling that I have often in Singapore. This largely secular island is filled with architectural extravagances which, despite my reservations about the resources involved, constantly amaze me. Architects place boat-like structures on top of casinos or turn lotus flowers into museums or build waterfalls and temperate rainforests inside vast, glass, refrigerated snow-domes.

http://sg.lifestyleasia.com/features/Entertainment/
singapore%E2%80%99s-latest-performing-arts-
centre-the-star-opens

Last Wednesday I visited a particularly inspiring space. Sharon, my wife, bought tickets for us to hear Nora Jones singing at the Star Theatre. The tickets were expensive but the theatre alone made me feel like we were getting our money’s worth. Vast escalators suspended in open space carried us up through glass floors and into suspended anti-chambers which took us to more escalators and then into a theatre space that dwarfed anything I have ever been in. A black roof dotted with star-like lights and two sweeping mezzanines which seemed bigger than half a football stadium provided space for 5000 people. Nora Jones was extraordinary, and, with the physical force of the music combining with the atmosphere of the theatre, the experience came as close as I think I am likely to get to religion. How interesting, then, to discover that the Star Theatre project is a joint venture between  a mall developer and a church and that each week thousands of Christians ride the escalators past the designer clothes shops to meet in this space.

I remain ambivalent about religion, but once again I have found myself standing in awe in a religious space.