Spinning a Yarn

In the 1980s, when I went to Melbourne University, the Old Arts building had only one renovated lecture theatre. In contrast to the oak panelling and uncomfortable chairs of the other spaces, the "Public Lecture Theatre" had tiered seating upholstered in the pastels of late '80s modernity. It was a place of flickering fluorescent lights and shimmering contrasts. Outside, the sandstone walls spoke of tradition and gravitas; inside, the sound-absorbing roof panels whispered invitations to the future.

Each week I sat in this shimmering space for my "Introduction to Philosophy" lecture. My lecturer was one of the best teachers I have ever had. Frustratingly I don't remember much about him, but I have vivid recollections of his teaching. Lectures would begin with him walking briskly to the lectern, removing his tweed cap and taking a piece of chalk from his pocket. The entire lecture would be structured as a conversation between "Chalky" and "Hatty". Hatty would pose a problem to which Chalky would respond - occasionally using one of the many blackboards to illustrate his point. I don't remember my teacher ever referring to notes nor do I remember him ever standing still; he paced constantly, eye's closed, holding in turn Chalky or Hatty as the dialogue progressed.

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Two particular lectures have stayed deeply rooted in my memory. The first was an introduction to Plato's Theory of Forms. Plato, in responding to the philosophic challenge of how we might know the universal essence of a thing, developed one of the most famous theories in philosophy. Let me try to illustrate the problem and Plato's solution.

Hatty: This morning I drank coffee from my coffee cup. As I drank, I wondered about how I know that a cup is a cup. I know my particular coffee cup is a cup because I have drunk from it before and I recognise it as the cup I drank from yesterday. But if today my housemate accidentally broke this particular cup and bought a new one to replace it and left it on the table for me, how would I know that the new cup was a cup and not, for example, a plate? No two cups are exactly alike and the new cup might be a little shorter or taller or fatter or thinner. It would likely have slightly different characteristics to any other cup I had ever known, but I would still know it to be a cup. How could this be?

Chalky: Well Socrates would tell you that in your head you have a perfect image of "cupness" and when you see the new cup, you compare it to this image and note that it fits the image more nearly than it does that of your image of "plateness" or any other category you hold in your head. Socrates called these categories "Forms" and argued that they are deeply grounded in our minds. They are part of an ideal world which includes also categories like "Good" and "Evil".

In a very simplistic nutshell, that is Plato's Theory of Forms. Hatty would no doubt have a lot of questions to ask about the idea as have philosophers since.

Assessment - from a Platonic perspective

The Theory of Forms has something in common with the challenge we as teachers have in assessing students' writing. Like the "cup" on the table, we must decide whether a student essay is a good approximation of "essayness" or not. But like the cup bought by Hatty's housemate, every student essay will have properties that are unique; there will be combinations of words I have never seen before. So how, when I look at an essay, can I decide if it is a good approximation of the ideal?

A common answer teachers bring to this problem is the rubric. One view of a writing rubric is that it describes the characteristics of an ideal essay and acts as a template for judging individual student approximations of this ideal.

Immediately, of course, we hit a problem. Plato's forms exist only in the abstract (like the idea of a perfect circle) and a rubric that was even close to accurate would need to be so detailed as to be unworkable. Such a rubric might describe some of the elements of an ideal essay, but could never tell us how to combine these elements with originality or creativity and an essay without originality or creativity is surely not an ideal essay at all. In the end what rubrics for writing (such as those used for the GCSE) often end up saying is that an excellent essay demonstrates creativity and flare, which, as a detailed guide to teaching and assessment, isn't much use. In essence, all a rubric of this nature is telling a reader is that a good essay show's "good-essay-ness".

An alternative view

Fortunately Chalky and Hatty had more to say on the matter. Whilst the early lectures focussed on an introduction to Plato, some of the later ones address more modern responses to the same issues. A lecture about Wittgenstein's theory of Family Resemblances is vividly in my memory.

Hatty: Understanding how two objects are related is difficult. One of the problems I am finding with Plato's Theory of Forms is that it seems to require that the ideal forms are present in my head from birth and that doesn't seem to correspond with my understanding of the world. I know that I can learn new things and whilst I can agree that there seem to be some categories that might be in my head from the beginning, that doesn't seem to be the case for many of the things I think I know. Maybe the concept of a circle was always in my mind, but I don't think the concept of a Canadian was. The category "Canadian" seems to be something I have learned and I can even imagine that, had history unfolded differently, this category might never have existed. Plato certainly would not have had an category of "Canadian". 

Chalky: Indeed. The problem of how we can understand two related objects as being connected is very difficult. There is another way of understanding the problem developed by the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

Imagine you have a family with 5 brothers. 

Brother one has blue eyes, long hair, a long nose and big ears. 

Brother two has blue eyes, long hair, a long nose but small ears.

Brother three has blue eyes, long hair but a short nose and small ears.

Brother four has blue eyes but short hair, a short nose and small ears.

Brother five has brown eyes, short hair, a short nose and small ears.

All five brothers belong to the same family but brothers one and five have no characteristics in common. What links them is not their individual characteristics but their relationship through shared characteristics with other members of the family. 

Hatty: Interesting. But how does this help to solve the problems of essential understandings that we found existed in Plato's theory? 

Chalky: Well what Wittgenstein is pointing out is that words and concepts don't have to have meaning in any essential way, but they can point to relationships or connections. What makes our 5 brothers members of the same family is not any particular quality they share, but the connections between them. If we think about the problem of recognising the cup that my housemate has bought, it is not any essential "cupness" that makes the new cup a cup, but some qualities which I recognise it as sharing with some other cups. 

Although this may not sound very profound there is a very important difference in recognising the problem from this perspective of resemblances or, as Wittgenstein described them on other occasions, as language games. "Cupness" becomes not an essence but a set of shared characteristics which I recognise because I have been learning this "game". The rules of "cupness" can change as my culture changes its conventions on what will be seen as a cup. The rules of "Canadianess" are certainly changing constantly both at a formal legal level and also at the more subtle level of cultural identity. 

Another metaphor that Wittgenstein used to explain the nature of concepts is that of a thread. In referring to the concept of "number" here's what he said:

Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. (source)

Hatty: So the insight we take from Wittgenstein is that words indicate relationships and we know concepts as being like a set of games, or connections or threads that we are constantly weaving and elaborating and extending. 

Chalky: Exactly.

Some implications for assessment.

As we develop Standards and Benchmarks for our curriculum at UWCSEA and prepare them for use in our teaching and assessment, how should we understand their nature and purpose?

No doubt my thinking will evolve as the yarn spins, but, for the moment, here's what Chalky has lead me to think:

Rubrics are useful because they help to organise and prioritise the fibres that we will focus on in our teaching and students will use to make the threads of their learning. But the threads themselves are beyond the scope of a rubric, and, in the end, it is the threads that matter most, not the fibres.

To put this another way: our curriculum helps us to define specific parts of an essay that are useful to learn because this learning points to characteristics of language games which help students understand the cultural territory of "the essay". But a curriculum (or a rubric) can never provide the kind of complexity needed to understand how a specific essay fits within the category "essayness". This requires the enormous complexity of a well-trained, culturally complex, essay reader - a professional English teacher. The teacher who reads the essay and notices the original organisation of words can look to see how these words fit within the conventions of the game of "essayness" and make a decision about whether this particular essay is playing the game with flair or not.

This suggest two things to me about assessment in English:

1. The role and function of rubrics is limited. Powerful, yes, in focussing in on the crafted fibres of learning that expert teachers hone to point students towards the culturally vast and unstable spaces of understandings. But limited in that they are never an end in themselves.

2. Teachers need to trust their professional knowledge when they make judgements about attainment. In the end, it is the skill of the expert reader that we need to rely on when judgements are to be made about the way a particular essay has engaged in the playful cultural spaces of our language games.

Spinning a yarn

In Australia, my home, the process of storytelling is known vernacularly as "spinning a yarn". Bushmen sit drinking tea around campfires conjuring worlds from their words. For me, one of the great mysteries of the world is how this process works. How is it that a particular combination of words can come together in the hands of a gifted storyteller to build something strong and beautiful?

What Wittgenstein suggests is that spinning a yarn is not a skill we are born with but one we learn through our rich engagement in the complexity of our culture. I thank my wonderful lecturer and Chalky and Hatty for sharing this understanding.

At the most profound level, learning is a conversation; a thread we continue to spin.

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.

Moral obligations of YA literature

Mice by Gordon Reece
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I didn't like this book and I don't feel I have a right to be overly critical of a book unless I can put in the time to explain why - so here goes.

This is a YA book and, whilst I'm not of the opinion that YA literature should shield readers from the harsh realities of the world, I do believe that it has a moral responsibility to treat difficult issues with complexity and insight. As the narrator of the novel notes:

"So much of what Mum was was made up of what she'd read. Is that what our middle-class culture created? People formed more by the books they'd read than the lives they'd lived?" (p.199)

To the extent that this may be true, I was disappointed by the lack of empathy or insight shown in the novel. The main character is a victim of cruel bullying which drives her to decide to suicide. A series of events saves her from taking her own life. She then goes on to murder two people. Despite having been a victim herself, Shelley, the first-person narrator of the novel, shows little or no empathy for her victims. There's a level of egotism that is in itself quite frightening. In another moment of reflection she says:

"After everything I've lived through, surely I'll be able to write something truly great? After all, how many writers actually know what it's like to kill somebody?" (pp.224-225)

And this is where I think the novel fails. Reece didn't convince me that he truly understood his subject matter. Too often I felt that Shelley's introspective moments were there to move me to the next point in the plot rather than to explore honestly this difficult subject matter.

If the novel had been about a less difficult and important topic or if it had taken a much lighter hand to it's subject matter, I could be more forgiving, but if you choose to write a YA novel about these topics you have a moral responsibility to say something that matters. I don't think this novel does.

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Imagine

It’s the complexity of it all

That gives me a headache.

Reimagining John Lennon’s

Song with my Grade Six

Students, we stumbled into

The binary of black

And white as John

And Yoko walk down a

Dark path to arrive

At a white house and

Yoko opens shutters to

Illuminate an empty

Room in a place they

Call “not here”.

The peaceful simplicity of a

Black and white world

Greyed as we walked

Our own path:

Black White,

Wrong Right,

Evil Goodness,

Dirty Clean,

Ambiguity Clarity,

Weak Strong,

Chaos Logic,

South North,

African European,

Female Male,
Innocence,
Experience,

And arrived at a room

Where my illumination

Opened eyes
And minds onto

A world which is increasingly

Hard to see.

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.'

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.

Telling stories

Image from Wikimedia commons

The first film I directed starred Emmy Award winner Guy Pearce. To be fair, my friends Ben and Phil might also have some claim to the role of director but it was my Dad's camera, so I have always felt entitled to take credit. We shot the film in Super 8 in the back yard of my family home. Apart from Guy, this epic also starred our aging family dog, an overweight, corgi-beagle cross with limited mobility and no obedience training.

The film was called "Killer Dog" and followed the complex relationship between man and dog as it was developed over the 2 minutes shooting time that our pocket money allowed. Guy ran from the dog. The dog chased him (after a fashion). Close shot of the dog salivating. Wide shot of dog attacking Guy. Close shot of Guy on the ground with arm buried in a hole we had dug in the lawn (mother not impressed). Further close shot of previous night's roast lamb shank protruding from Guy's sleeve with considerable quantities of tomato sauce. Sound track taken from "Jaws". Film ends.

I was thinking about the film this week during training sessions with Jerry Maraia from Columbia University Teachers' College. Jerry spent the week skilling us up on Reader's Workshop techniques and helping us think about the effective teaching of reading and writing in our Middle School English classes.

One key technique in "Workshop" is the use of a "teaching point" and one key professional practice is the development of these teaching points. My students, I feel, often struggle with knowing where to begin and end their writing. Once started, their stories sometimes feel like a runaway train that will run on endlessly giving the reader no sense that they will ever be able to get off.

As kids, our early attempts at film-making taught us a useful lesson about shaping stories. The cost of film reels meant that we had only a few minutes to play with and editing was a difficult process that literally involved cutting and pasting strips of film together. The cost and effort involved meant that we spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted our final film to look like. Planning was careful and we needed a clear and dramatic story.

"See it like a movie in your head" is a common piece of advice teachers give young writers. But it also helpful to think of that movie as shot in Super 8 - short and requiring some careful thought before you begin.

And one last piece of advice I could give: it's helpful if you can get Guy Pearce to act your main role because he provides a great hook into your writing.

(If you happen to read this, Guy, the film may still be in the cupboard at my parent's place and you'd be welcome to it)

Finding a line in shifting sands

Thoughts, like water, are essential to sustaining life but they are similarly difficult to shape. Writers must always struggle with the possibility - no the probability - that the texts they pour their ideas into will take a different shape in the minds of their readers. For me, as a writer, this is my greatest struggle: to find forms for my ideas which have enough structure and integrity to sustain their approximate shape as they pass into the minds of others.

The significance of this struggle has been foremost in my mind as I have reflected on whether to publish the post I wrote last week.

What I wrote responds to the sentiments of Mikhail Gorbachev published last month in a letter ofcongratulations (p.26) to the United World College movement on the occasion of the movement’s 50^th anniversary. Gorbachev writes about how little he feels has been achieved since the end of the cold war; he argues that, instead of striving to make the world a better place, the last twenty years has seen a focus on ‘superprofits and overconsumption, on social and environmental irresponsibility, making the human being merely a cog in an economic machine.’ In my post I paid tribute to Gorbachev as a man of integrity and vision and I wrote about the incongruities of the affluence that supports the UWC movement and the challenges that Gorbachev believes face the world.

Because I work for one of the United World Colleges (UWCSEA) my own position on this issue is complex. The UWC mission statement says that, “UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future,” and so a part of my job is to prepare students to critically engage with the world as they strive to improve it. But I also work in Singapore and so when I signed my work contract, I agreed that I would not comment publically about the Singapore Government. My lifestyle, my affluence, my students’ lives and the affluence that is necessary to the very existence of my school is predicated on the economic miracle that is Singapore and Gorbachev is asking some challenging questions about the economic foundations of this system. It is difficult to ask these questions without also reflecting on the economic values of the city in which we live and there is a risk, as I explore Gorbachev’s writing, that I could find myself being critical of the government here in Singapore.

I am overstating the problem of my own post but I am doing so because I have a further point to make. What I wrote is not critical of the Singaporean Government nor would I want it to be. I don’t know exactly where the line is in the sand that I must not cross, but I am experienced and aware enough to know roughly where it is and to stay carefully at a distance. My real worry about my post is that it is written – like this post – largely for my students and I don’t know that this line is as easily discerned by them.

And this is the real challenge that I wish to raise: how do my students, who are by definition young and learning about the world, explore and challenge the status quo without the risk of crossing lines? What is my responsibility as a teacher in regard to inviting enquiry but protecting my students from crossing into territory where they should not go? Should my students’ blogs be public and thus allow a meaningful engagement with the world, or private and there-by remove much of the risk but also much of the engagement? If I am not standing beside my students when they enter the online world, am I leaving them to enter it alone and without guidance?

The complexities of these challenges were highlighted by the recent transgressions of an Australian/Malaysian woman here in Singapore. Amy Cheong wrote a ‘Facebook post railing over the noise from a Malay wedding being held in a void deck near her home, which was filled with expletives and insults about the community’ (The Strait Times October 13, p. D4). Within 24 hours, Cheong had been sacked by her employer and left Singapore.

The media discussion around Ms Cheong's treatment has been extensive. Whether the response was proportionate is not my concern in this post. What I would like to note is that Ms Cheong was tertiary educated, 37 years old and professionally employed by the National Trades Union Congress. She should have known where to find the line.

When I write about issues of economics or social justice, so should I. But when I do so, I tacitly open this possibility for my students, too, and I can’t expect them to be as able when reading the nuances of the world. That is why I am writing this post: to remind my students that the writing they do in their blogs (and in their private lives on Facebook) is real and can have real consequences. This is powerful and something to be embraced, but, as they experiment in the sandpit of the internet, it is important that my students are constantly thinking about where the line might be.

In the Saturday Straits Times (13/10/12, p. D4), Law Professor Tan Cheng Han, chair of the Singapore Media Literacy Council (MLC), was asked to comment on the Cheong incident. As part of his article, he wrote about what the public can do to engender a better social media environment:

As in the real world, show your disapproval of anti-social behaviour. And also try to be fair-minded and courteous even in disagreement.

            After all, most people who don’t agree with you are more likely to at least see your point of view if you put it across politely.

            They may even come round to your point of view eventually, but they almost certainly won’t if you put your points across insultingly and condescendingly.

I am educating young people to make a better world: Prof Tan Cheng Han’s advice seems like a solid foundation on which to build that world. Finding an appropriate line in the sand will always require careful reading and thoughtful engagement with others and I don’t believe my students can do this from outside the sandpit. I want them engaged, active, thoughtful and respectfully changing the world. Thought and language always requires care and negotiation as ideas are passed from one mind to another. These are skills that must be taught and learned.

My advice to my students:

• ·            Think about who might read your writing and what it might mean to them.
• ·            Write respectfully.
• ·            Be productively provocative – ask questions of your world and expect that it can be better.
• ·            Strive to understand the context in which you live and write and, if you’re not sure, ask others who might understand it better.
• ·            Draft – because drafting means, amongst other things, that you will take some time between writing and publishing. It is always good to get another opinion on your writing and to reread it yourself with fresh eyes.
• ·            Remember that there can be consequences for getting it wrong – both for you, for me, for your family and for your school – but that we trust you to explore the world honestly and respectfully and we support you in doing this. I would far rather an honest mistake than a failure to try.