Banksia

When I trace my hand it’s 

Naturally the right that 

Picks up the pencil and marks

The page with tracing lines.

Dominance ironically results 

In the right being erased

And the image on the 

Page emerges as a

Mirror to that

Determination to define.

The wordless left:

An empty space

Inside the boundaries 

That seek to contain 

And frame and

Control.

The spirit of the Law,

A Terra Nullius,

Which we try to contain 

Within the legal letters that write

Who belongs where.

The vast openness 

That Banks and Cook 

Traced as they sailed

North labelling the

Flora and Fauna.

…

An educational mentor

Reminded me regularly that

“Values are Caught

Not Taught.”

“Create the right space” 

He said, 

“Model respect,”

Which he did,

Walking gently through 

The world. 

…

We wear paths 

In the landscape.

Tracings 

That define

Us

And circle 

The soils

Too beautiful, 

Too soft,

For words.

“Whereof one cannot speak

Thereof one must be silent.”*

Tracing our words

We map the edges 

Of the known world.

*Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. 

Banksia

This poem is my attempt to grapple with ideas in two remarkable books: Sand Talk: how indigenous thinking can change the world by Tyson Yunkaporta and The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

The book that began it all was McGilchrist’s and I came across his writing after hearing an interesting story. A couple of years ago, the judges of the High Court of Australia (that’s the court that interprets the constitution) were grappling with the problem of how they interpret the “spirit” of the law in contrast to the “letter” of the law. On the one hand, they have the documents that lay down understandings with a semblance of clarity through the reified language of the law; on the other hand, they have their understandings of the context in which laws are created by humans who make sense of the world in more than just words. The role of judges is to interpret the law but the words on the page don’t necessarily represent the entirety of the intent of the law makers who wrote them - particularly if you consider that much of our thinking and understanding is non-verbal. 

So the High Court judges looked around for someone to help them think through this problem and found McGilchrist. They invited him to Australia to join them for a study retreat. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist: at various times he has been Clinical Director at Bethlehem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in London, a researcher in neuroimaging at John Hopkins University, and a lecturer in English at Oxford University. The core argument in his book is that individuals have two basic modes for engaging with the world which correspond in loose neurological terms with functions in the two hemispheres of the brain. The one is when we put the world into words; the other is when we look for patterns and relationships. Describing the latter function he writes:

Another way of thinking of this would be more generally in terms of the ultimate importance of context. Context is that ‘something’ (in reality nothing less than a world) in which whatever is seen inheres, and in which its being lies, and in reference to which alone it can be understood, lying both beyond and around it. The problem with the ‘attentional spotlight’, as conventional psychological literature calls it, is that this isolates the object of attention from its context - not just its surroundings, but the depth in which it lives. It opacifies it. Our vision stops at ‘the thing itself’. The price is that this sheering away of the context produces something lifeless and mechanical. In a famous passage in the Meditations, Descartes speaks of looking form a window and seeing men pass on the street. ‘Yet’, he reflects, ‘do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.’ It is not surprising that, shorn by the philosophical stare of all context that might give them meaning, the coats and hats that Descartes sees from his window walking about in the street could be animated by a machine. They have become fully opaque; the observer no longer passes through them to see the living person beneath. He no longer sees what is implied. However, the attention of the right hemisphere, concerned as it is with the being in context, permits us to see through them to the reality that lies around and beyond them. It could not make the mistake of seeing the clothes and hats in isolation. (p.181)

Words show us what is, context show us what it means. Through an exhaustive review of neuropsychological research and a detailed journey through the history of philosophy and art and literature, McGilchrist shows how an increasing separation between words and context is a hallmark of Western civilisation. He argues that this has made societies increasingly bureaucratic and structured and decreasingly adaptive and engaged. The letter of the law is engulfing the spirit of democracy.

Which is pretty much what Tyson Yunkaporta argues too, but in a very different way. 

Yunkaporta is an Alpalech man from Western Cape York in the north of Australia and a lecturer in Indigenous Knowledge at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. In Sand Talk, he explores the contrast between western thought and indigenous thought; how each frames the world and responds to its problems. He writes about “haptic” or embodied knowledge and argues that:

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships - deep connections between generations of people in custodial relationship to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition. This doesn’t need to replace print, but it can supplement it magnificently. (p.167)

I don’t know if McGilchrist and Yunkaporta have ever met, but if they did, I would sure like to sit by and listen to that yarn. 

Yunkaporta writes often about hands - as mnemonic devices, as the physical conduits of thought - and I think it is from him that I picked up the metaphor of hands in my poem. He doesn’t write in his book about James Cook or Joseph Banks, the Captain and gentleman botanist of The Endeavour which sailed up the east coast of Australia in 1770. Both characters fascinate me. I’ve read Cook’s log in the remarkable book H.M. Bark the Endeavour by Ray Parkin and Patrick O’Brien’s insightful Joseph Banks, a Life and neither Cook nor Banks strike me as the kinds of people who would have wished for the environmental and cultural destruction their mapping unleashed. 

I see myself as part of that unleashing. Particularly my work as a teacher. In a literal sense because so little of the education systems I have been a part of even begins to show respect for indigenous knowledge, but in a more subtle sense because the needs of our world to engage respectfully with one another and the environment are not well-served by education. 

The right hand of knowledge is constantly telling us how to live, without a counterbalancing respect for an alternative sense of embedded being. 

In education this tension is particularly represented by the predominance of exams. One potential countervailing mechanism is what is known as “Capabilities” in some curricula and “Approaches to Learning” in others. Capabilities or ATLs are attempts to value student's attitudes and approaches to knowledge but the challenge is that we don’t seem to know what to do with them. When we try assessing them, it feels wrong; intuitively, I think, we realise we’re making them subservient to the exam culture again. They end up remaining token elements at the fringe of education. 

I think McGilchrist and Yunkaporta nudge me towards a different way of thinking about education in general and Capabilities/ATLs in particular. I need to find ways to better honour process, engagement, connection and enjoyment without resort to numbers and definitions. In education, we need to build a culture where the sharing of a child’s story has a greater value than the grade it is given. 

Brian Henderson, the Headmaster I worked for at Woodleigh, showed us that “values are taught, not caught”. When the beautiful natural environment of the school had too much rubbish, he would wander around at recess chatting to the kids and picking up papers. I found it impossible to watch him do this without picking up a few myself. Students would see, and a culture develop. In education I think we need to spend a little less time working out what to teach and a little more time working out who to be.

When Brian retired, the school gave him a gift: the naming of a new cultivar of the indigenous Banksia. I didn’t remember this fact when I wrote the first draft of this poem and it was only after looking back through the poem and remembering that Joseph Banks gave the bush its European name that I remembered Brian and found a name for the poem. The thing about a poem is that it can embody a kind of haptic knowledge greater than prose. It’s a space for meaning inviting the reader to open potentials and trace their own paths as they look sideways for meaning. As a teacher, I've never been able to work out how to give a grade to poetry.

In search of the holy grail of assessment

A perfect storm of converging ideas brings this post into being.

A recent IBO program on "Affective Skills and Mindful Living" has got me thinking more about the skills students need for success post school. This reminded me of the role of Capabilities in the Australian curriculum which in turn took me to an article by Richard Bates where he writes:

The central assessment issue for educational institutions has now become that of how teachers and learners are to devise ways of testing validity claims – of testing the validity of information and knowledge claims that are new to both. This is by no means a simple issue, but contemporary circumstances force the issue to the centre of the curriculum and pedagogy of educational institutions. The open curriculum and an autonomous pedagogy require tests for truth and utility that are centred around individual and social purpose.  

(Bates: 2012, Is global citizenship possible and can international schools provide it? p.272 quoting an earlier article he wrote in 2008)

The challenge is complex, but the essence of it, as I see it, is to understand how we prepare students for a future where they can write their stories rather than ours.

One major part of what we do in education is transfer the understandings and opportunities of one generation to the next. Paraphrasing Schultz (1.) via Bates, this "neo-liberal" approach to teaching and learning focuses on the content of curricula assuming that the role of education is to equip students with the key knowledge they will use to replicate and acquire positional advantage in future societies. Once that key knowledge has been identified, benchmarked and disseminated to schools and teachers through documents like the IB curriculum the Australian Curriculum or UWCSEA's Learning

Program, teachers know what to teach, students know what to learn and examiners know what to assess. Those who learn it best can get the highest grades to take them to the most prestigious universities and be first in line to be the next generation of leaders. The best schools become those that get the best grades and provide parents and students with access to a future with economic and personal security.

The problem with an education system built on these neo-liberal lines is that it runs the risk of reproducing both the strengths and the failures of the past and of creating students who know what to think but not necessarily how - students whose education has given them knowledge about one way of understanding the world but not the skills to find other ways. This kind of education does little to address the sorts of concerns that  Mikhail Gorbachev raised in 2012 in this letter to the UWC community:

In today’s world, old threats to peace are persisting and new ones are emerging.The current economic crisis, the crisis of international relations and the threat of a new arms race testify to the fact that the twenty years after the end of the Cold War have been largely wasted instead of being used to build a more secure and just world order. The economy of many countries is in deep crisis. One of the causes of this crisis is the model that has defined global development for the past few decades, a model based on seeking super-profits and overconsumption, on social and environmental irresponsibility, making the human being merely a cog in an economic machine.

A neo-liberal curriculum does little to prepare students to transform the world and instead is more likely to solidify the processes that have created the problems in the first place.

...oOo...

My description of the IB, the Australian Curriculum and UWCSEA's Learning Program does none of the three curricula justice, of course. All three curricula have very deliberately built into them structures to teach students how to think and spaces for students to develop the autonomy they need if they are to be the creative leaders of the future.

In the IB these structures are most specifically represented by the "Approaches to Learning" (ATLs), in the Australian Curriculum by the Capabilities and in the UWCSEA Learning Program by the "Skills and Qualities." Following further Schultz's formulation of different schemata for understanding education, it is the existence of these elements of the respective curricula that might most represent the possibility of a "transformationalist" rather than a "neo-liberal" approach to education. These are the the key elements that underpin a more 'autonomous pedagogy'  which has the potential to empower the next generation to creatively engage with the world and write their own stories rather than re-writing ours.

Of these three curriculum structures, it is the Capabilities that have been around for the longest. Their earliest versions go back nearly 25 years to the 1989 "Hobart Declaration" and became more fully articulated in the 2008 "Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians." The two key goals of the Melbourne Declaration are:

Goal 1: Australian schooling promotes equity and excellence 

Goal 2: All young Australians become:

– Successful learners
– Confident and creative individuals
– Active and informed citizens 

And the second goal is broken down into 24 specific descriptors. Here are three examples:

Successful Learners:

• are creative, innovative and resourceful, and are able to solve problems in ways that draw upon a range of learning areas and disciplines

Confident and creative individuals:

• develop personal values and  attributes such as honesty, resilience, empathy and respect for others 

Active and informed citizens:

• act with moral and ethical integrity

These are wonderful goals and in their modern form as "Capabilities" are surely central to shaping a population ready to address the problems that Mikhail Gorbachev reminds us are so pressing.

The challenge, however, is in giving the Capabilities the space they deserve in the curriculum. For nearly 25 years leaders in business, education and politics in Australia have been saying that we need to be teaching the skills students need to be the autonomous leaders of the future. Speaking from my own experience at the chalk-face through that period of time, nothing much has changed. And I am not sure that the Capabilities, as they are being articulated through the Australian Curriculum will have much impact either.

The problem, as I see it, is in the monolithic shadow of Year 12 exams. Skills can't be assessed in isolation and if something can't be assessed, it has a hard time surviving in a school. The academic subjects with their Neo-liberal capacity to support the processes of sifting and sorting through the Year 12 exams, dominate the pages of the Australian Curriculum; it is through the lens of the subjects that the Capabilities are being articulated. The Capability of "Ethical Understanding", for example, finds it's articulation in English as:

Students develop ethical understanding as they study the issues and dilemmas present in a range of texts and explore how ethical principles affect the behaviour and judgment of characters and those involved in issues and events. Students apply the skills of reasoning, empathy and imagination, consider and make judgments about actions and motives, and speculate on how life experiences affect and influence people’s decision making and whether various positions held are reasonable.

This kind of articulation adds very little to what English teachers have always done: we look carefully at ethical ideas in texts, discuss them, and students write about them in exams. The key problem is "write about them in exams". As long as the summative objective for assessment of skills is an exam, students and teachers remain trapped within a system which, by definition, requires normative judgements and limits the capacity of students to imaginatively engage with their own stories. In the example of English, this is quite literally the case; English exams are structured around students writing about the stories of others, it is beyond the imaginative scope of an exam system to assess students who are writing their own stories.


So what is the answer? It is not, in my opinion, to do away with Year 12 exams or to try to break down the walls that hold up the Subject edifices. We need the stories of the past in our future and we need students to know how to work with them. What we also need is students skilled and confident enough to write stories of their own when these stories are needed. The credibility and reliability of Year 12 exams are a very important pillar of stability in our cultures - both in regard to their reproduction of knowledge and in the stability they provide as a mechanism for sorting and selecting. Articulation of skills like "ethical behaviour" as a Capability - or ATL or "Skill and Quality" - through subject knowledge can do no harm, but as long as we are thinking only of high-stakes exams, I can't see the skills being given the opportunity to do a whole lot of good.

The answer, to my way of thinking, is in the other places and spaces in our curricula where we can assess differently.

This puts a very clear responsibility on the k-10 curriculum. And once again, my description of the Australian Curriculum (and tarred with the same brush the IB and the UWCSEA Learning Program) does it no justice. There are no exams required in the Australian Curriculum prior to Year 11/12. The long shadow of Year 12 certainly has an influence over how teachers and students think in the lower years, but there is no policy requirement to assess with exams.

The question this begs is how should students be assessed K - 10? What does an assessment system that 'tests for truth and utility' in forms 'centred around individual and social purpose' look like? If my analysis is correct, then clearly not like an exam where 'truth and utility' are centred around the power structures of a familiar elite and the normalising tendencies of existing knowledge.

This is too big a question to explore in any detail in this post but it's one I need to return to; my purpose in this post was not to provide a comprehensive answer but to ask what I hope is a compelling question. That said, here are a few preliminary thoughts towards some kinds of assessment which might better support student autonomy and skill development in line with the Capabilities/ATLs/Skills and Qualities:

• The process of setting goals and teacher and student evaluation against those goals puts students more at the centre of their learning. 

• Spending more time outside classrooms exploring how to use their skills in and on the world would seem like another potential opportunity.

• I think my Outdoor Ed colleagues would be mumbling under their breath that it is about time the rest of us caught up - they've been doing this for generations.

• Our Middle School Writing units all have built into them this question to the student:

How are you going to publish your writing? 

In other words, who or how will your writing influence, change, inspire, entertain, engage, amuse, enrage, provoke or prod? In engaging with students around this question, we are engaging with their skills for understanding their autonomy and social purpose. Conversations around who you want to write for and why can become conversations about being "principled" and "self-aware" as students grapple to build their skills for shaping the world. I prepare them for exams by teaching students to shape language, I prepare them for life by supporting them to learn how to shape the world.

At the moment this important question about publishing gets only a small space in my planning. What I have persuaded myself in this post is that it must get more.

• Student self assessment of learning through structures like "portfolios" of writing seem very important. A carefully considered "student lead portfolio assessment" process where students take the lead in demonstrating learning to parents has many of the elements that might support student autonomy and skill development - particularly if the Capabilities/ATLs/Skills and Qualities can be a structuring element.

• The IBO, in their wisdom, have a range of structures that develop student autonomy and encourage connection with authentic audiences. The Extended Essay CAS and TOK requirements in the IBDP are one mechanism as are the Exhibition in the PYP and Personal and Community projects in MYP.

I see the K - 10 curriculum as having a responsibility to balance the scales. Through necessity, subject content weighs heavy in the final years and skills get less priority in the curriculum. In the Middle School and the Primary School, we need to redress this balance and put more weight on the ability of students to demonstrate skills through autonomous and self-directed learning where reading the stories of others takes a bit less of the focus and writing stories of their own takes more.

1. Schultz L (2007) Educating for global citizenship. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research 5(3): 248–258.