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.

Littoral

From time to time a group of my Middle School English colleagues travel down to the Kindergarten to learn with and from our remarkable Kindergarten teachers. We use a protocol from their Reggio Emilia practice to explore student learning and become smarter teachers together. 

One teacher presents a brief snippet of learning from their classroom: something they videoed; a piece of student learning; an observation they have made. The rest of us listen as the teacher explains what they have brought and why. Then each of us responds one at a time exploring the learning through the various lenses of the student’s perspective, pedagogical perspectives and conceptual understandings. Finally the teacher who has brought the snippet reflects on what they’ve heard and there is discussion about how to push learning forward for this student or class.

When we met recently, we were asked to direct our focus to a new learning space that was being established just outside the classroom. From where we sat on tiny stools, knees around our ears in the K2 classroom, we looked out through the glass doors to a low wooden fence that had been placed under the outside awning. A space had been established as wide as the classroom and encroaching about 4 meters out into the playground. We were told that the students had expressed a desire to have a space to paint and work creatively outside and so the teacher had worked with them to establish this zone beyond the classroom. Her question was “what next?” how best could she work with the students and the space to support student growth?

Various observations were made about the way students were exploring creativity and play and the final conversation explored the way the space that had been mapped out existed as a transitional space between the playground and the classroom. As Shakespeare would put it, neither fish nor foul, this space was neither classroom nor playground but open to the defining grammars of either or both. 

We spent some time during this discussion exploring the implications of “play” and “creativity” and how ownership of the playful or creative space engenders agency and student engagement in the space and the learning. Students tend to own playgrounds, teachers tend to own classrooms. This littoral zone between the outside and the inside was a playful space where learning might be defined differently and creativity fostered. The trick, we decided, was in continuing to support the students to take ownership of the space and in exploring ways to break down some of the expectations around what belonged inside and out.

..........

I’m reminded by this conversation of a Gwen Harwood poem: “Littoral”. Harwood was an avid reader of Wittgenstein and her poetry often engages with the phenomenological challenges of language and meaning. How does language come to reflect a world "outside" and does our sense of reality exist in the space of language "inside" or in some kind of transitional space between? The inquiry is reminiscent of the noema/noesis dichotomy of Husserl later elaborated in the philosophy of Heidegger. 

The littoral zone Harwood evokes in her poetry is, at the literal level, the tidal zone between land and ocean ‘where life began’. Neither sea nor land, Harwood's littoral zone features elements of both; meaning exists there as a penumbra of potential. It’s a poetic space between certainty and ambiguity, land and water, where new understandings can be formed. 

“Littoral” describes a reverie as the poet’s children play on the tidal rocks and concludes:

My children call
across the wind for me to come;
the tide streams through a honeycomb
of rock and air. This littoral
margin of land and water still
vibrates with life, where life began.

In the poem Harwood’s reverie is broken by the calls of her children who are exploring the tidal pools around her. This, like the reverie that produces the poem, is a temporary space inhabitable only briefly before the tides sweep back to claim it.

..........

With Harwood's metaphor in mind, I return now to reconsider another piece of work that we looked at with our Kindergarten colleagues. This snippet was offered by a Grade 8 teacher and she began by showing us an entry ticket where the student apologised for being unable to explain the theme of a novel:

I have no idea. I hope you are having a nice day Ms X.

We then watched a video clip of the student having a conversation later in the class. The student described an event from his novel and then went on to reflect on what it might mean in terms of a theme. The explanation was a little off track for the novel and very tentative and the teacher was wondering what to do next.

Again our conversation turned to the agency of the student. This student had crossed from a pedagogical space where meaning was something he saw as coming from outside to something that he could start to explore and define for himself. The feeling of the group was that his efforts were to be celebrated and encouraged and that “getting it right” was a secondary concern at this point in his development. We discussed the need to keep supporting him as his identity changed from a person who is passively taught to a person who actively learns.


As I reflect on Harwoods metaphor of the littoral, it strikes me that this tentative step into finding meaning is profoundly important for the development of this student. A spark to be protected, fanned and fed further. This is a student who has seen school and literacy as something that is done to him and over which he has very limited control. In this piece of video, he was taking early steps to take control of the process and learning is becoming something he can do for himself.


And the Littoral zone that fostered this learning? For this student I feel it was two things: a "just right" novel that engaged him and give him the confidence to run with his ideas; and a classroom that gave him the space and grace to explore and search for his own meaning. 

..........

One final tentative reflection as I enter my own littoral zone between the space where we speak with confidence about curriculum and the watery uncertainties that support our emerging ideas. We are doing a lot of work with "knowledge" and "conceptual understanding" in our evolving curriculum design at UWCSEA. In much of this work I detect an implicit assumption that "knowledge" is one kind of epistemological entity and "conceptual understanding" a different kind of beast altogether. I would like to explore a different formulation: understanding as a littoral zone at the margins of the certainties of knowledge - not so much an entity as an attitude. Not so much something to be "discovered" as a way of engaging with knowledge. In this formulation I suspect that understanding is not a secondary state following knowledge but a more primary state of inquiry and uncertainty; a creative space where meanings can be formed because the hard-edged artifice of knowledge is worn away by waves of uncertainty.

Harwood explores something along these lines in another of her poems.

Thought Is Surrounded By A Halo 

Gwen Harwood 

Show me the order of the world,
the hard-edge light of this-is-so
prior to all experience and common
to both world and thought,
no model, but the truth itself. 

Language is not a perfect game,
and if it were, how could we play?
The world's more than the sum of things
like moon, sky, centre, body, bed,
as all the singing masters know. 

Picture two lovers side by side
who sleep and dream and wake
to hold the real and imagined world
body by body, word by word
in the wild halo of their thought.

Named after an aphorism from Wittgenstein, Harwood's poem reminds us that the playful space between language and the world is beyond naming. Knowing is not understanding and understanding is beyond knowing. Too much of learning exists in the firm ground of “knowledge” where the pedagogical grammars of control provide a firm ground of certainty. I suspect that understanding, by contrast, is a littoral zone where we engage with the watery uncertainties of the unknown. This littoral space is fragile, playful, creative and often a little disruptive; it’s a space between the K2 classroom and the outside playground, between the words of a novel and the inquiring mind of a reader, a space we inhabit tentatively when we are most alive and learning.

Kurt Hahn and Experiential Education

Admin building, Gordonstoun School, Scotland

This July I had the great pleasure of spending several hours in the Archive Library at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun was Kurt Hahn’s second school, dating back to the time of his exile to Britain from Germany in the 1930s.

The challenge of a library is how to find one’s way in. In the case of Gordonstoun, the literal path is through the front arch of the Round Square building then up some stairs to the main library - quaintly monastic with it’s raw wooden beams and thick stone walls - and through a rear door to a room which feels every bit like a chapel. 

The intellectual path is the more challenging. The archive is a forest of documents and memorabilia and the fear is that hours can be spent exploring one small region while other, more dramatic spaces, will be missed. Without a plan, you might walk in circles or find that you visit only the most well-trod routes and fail to discover something unique. So I began my navigation with a quote from Hahn, ‘The Moray Firth is my best school master,” and  the hope that I might learn more about his vision for experiential education by navigating a path through his writings about the sailing program.

The Moray Firth is the body of water closest to Gordonstoun; it’s where the school has always kept it’s sailing boats. Today they’re sleek fibreglass ocean-cruising yachts; in the 1930s they were a series of wooden boats traditionally rigged and every bit as capable as their modern counterparts. Hahn’s assertion that the Moray Firth is his most capable teacher is a statement about experiential education. It’s a statement about the power of challenge and a well-crafted learning environment and, for me, it’s a reminder that “the teacher” can be much more than just a person. 

I know from my time working in a number of Kurt Hahn organisations how central experiential education is to his vision. I have been an Outward Bound instructor in Australia, a teacher at Woodleigh School (a Round Square school in Australia) and my present teaching role is at the United World College of South East Asia in Singapore. In each of these organisations outdoor education is more than just an extra-curricular activity, it is central to the curriculum and intentionally designed to shape young minds in specific ways. Where classrooms teach knowledge, skills and understandings, experiential education focusses more on dispositions and attitudes that allow an individual to make something of themselves. 

One discovery in the archive that highlights Hahn’s focus on learning beyond academics is this 1950’s report template.

Notice the relatively small space allocated to English, Maths and other academic subjects. Achievement in each of these areas is represented by only a grade. More considerable space and teacher effort is devoted to describing dispositions like “public spirit” and “ability to plan”. In the Australian curriculum these dispositions are known as Capabilities, in the IB they’re the Approaches to Learning and in the UWCSEA curriculum we call them Skills and Qualities. The desire to teach and report on dispositions is still important in contemporary education, but it certainly isn’t front and centre in the way that it was for Kurt Hahn. 

In contemporary education we have elevated grades to give them a declarative authority beyond other professional teacher judgements. The apparatus of academic assessment - particularly Grade 12 exams - creates a social authority (in sociology this mechanism is called allocation) that often gives grades precedence over other forms of judgement. What Kurt Hahn’s 1950s report format does is balances the weight of judgements differently. It says, as much by its format as by its words, that how we act is more significant than what we know.

In the 1950s when WWII was in near memory, the need to find balance between knowledge and actions must have been pressing. Gordonstoun, like all schools at the time, was a very changed place with many of its teachers having seen active service and some of its staff not having returned from the war. Academic achievement must have seemed less impressive and less pressing when it was personal actions like planning and ability to manage hardship which were keeping people alive and winning battles a few years before. 

This is simplistic, of course. Not far away on the coast of Scotland are the remains of the early RADAR installations which were critical to defence in the the Battle of Britain. WWII was a technological war as much as it was a war of human values and technical knowledge was as much a weapon as determination. But in the 1950s, agency and human dispositions must have seemed very much at the fore of educational thought at Gordonstoun as this report format shows.

Which brings me back to sailing. The story of the Gordonstoun boys sailing the Prince Louis down to Wales during WWII has an important place in the mythology of Outward Bound and we have used this story in our Grade 6 curriculum at UWCSEA East. In summary, when Gordonstoun’s location on the coast of Scotland became too dangerous during the war, the decision was taken to relocate to a safer location in Wales. Most of the school population travelled down by train but a small group of boys sailed down as crew of the school boat, Prince Louis. Over several weeks they sailed down the Caledonian Canal to the West coast of Scotland and through the Irish sea to Wales. They spent several days disoriented in the Irish sea and eventually fell in with a Merchant Navy convoy coming in from the Atlantic. The seamanship and personal qualities of the boys who crewed for this voyage played a part in convincing benefactors of the value of the Outward Bound movement which Kurt Hahn founded soon after.

As I discovered in the Gordonstoun Archives, sailing was a central part of the learning program at all of the Schools that Kurt Hahn built - Salem, Gordonstoun, and UWC Atlantic. I think it was the challenge and camaraderie of sailing that Hahn valued. He wrote that:

an eminent man challenged me to explain what sailing in a schooner could do for international education. In reply, I said we had at that moment the application before us for a future king of an Arab country to enter Gordonstoun. I happened to have at the school some Jews...If the Arab and one of these Jews were to go out sailing on our schooner. . .perhaps in a Northeasterly gale, and if they were become thoroughly seasick together, I would have done something for international education.

It’s hard to quantify the value of experiential education. In the world where I live and teach, it often feels as if money is the best security - that economic prosperity is what will make the world safe - and that is perhaps partly true. Grades on academic subjects are a way that we allocate positions at universities which lead to higher paying jobs and a greater possibility of financial security. 

I think, however, that security meant something different to Hahn and the post-war generation. For Hahn, security was paradoxically a product of testing ourselves in challenging experiential environments and learning the personal dispositions that would build a better world. 

Our challenge as we shape learning in the present time, is to think about what kinds of security we need and how best to prepare our students for the challenges ahead. 

Thank you Louise Avery, Gordonstoun Archivist, and Claire MacGillivray, Director of the Gordonstoun Summer School program, for welcoming Sharon and me into your school.

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.

Using story to make sense of the world

Writing curriculum is a adventure story all of its own.

By Alfred Henry Miles (1848-1929)
[Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

I wrote in November about the power of seeing curriculum as dialectical rather than as a linear narrative. In essence, the argument was that student learning is more effective when curriculum content* is constructed through an ongoing conversation between teachers and the curriculum authority rather than being mandated by a set of commandments from on high. The agency this gives teachers translates into agency for students. When curriculum is based on an understanding that 'the mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence, the possibility of the unthinkable,' to quote the sociologist Basil Bernstein (Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity p. 11), then teaching and learning can be truly empowering; students can be prepared for a world where they have the agency to change the defining discourses rather than being controlled by them.

The power and potential of the approach that UWCSEA has taken through writing its own curriculum was highlighted for me this week both in my classroom and in the weekly planning session with the Grade 8 English team.

Let me tell the story...

...o0o...

Making sense of the world

A play in one act

SCENE: Jabiz's classroom. A classroom on the 5th floor of UWCSEA's East campus in Singapore. The structure of the room is quite traditional but Jabiz has brought it to life with pot-plants and cushions and clear demarcations between the working spaces (chairs and tables around the back of the room) and the instruction space (couches and beanbags at the front of the room). Sitting on the couches looking at the whiteboard are Jabiz, Stuart and Ian. The two other members of the team, Paula and Adrienne, are in Manila and Phnom Phen respectively. Paula is helping to select the next group of Scholars to represent the Philippines at one of the 14 United World Colleges around the world. Adrienne is in Cambodia on a service trip using her ICT skills to help support learning in a range of schools that UWCSEA work with. (The location of Paula and Adrienne is not directly relevant to this story but it is pretty cool! - it shows how serious the school is about its mission to use education to make a better world). On the whiteboard is a projection of the planning document for the current Grade 8 unit on reading.**

JABIZ: Hey, I'm really liking the way the kids are getting into this unit at the moment.

IAN: Yeah, one of my kids greeted me in class today by saying "can we learn like this all the time?"

STUART: Agreed. We talked a few weeks ago about how the students seemed less motivated than we wanted but they have definitely turned a corner. What are we doing right?

JABIZ: I think it's down to the choices we're giving them. Modelling the skills first and then getting the kids to demonstrate their understanding in novels that they choose is the way to go.

IAN: Choosing the right books is key here though...

JABIZ: Exactly. So we model by working through a common class novel that is a bit easier and accessible and then we put the kids in groups to try out the skills on books that are right for them.

IAN: I think that's the thing we really nailed in this part of the unit: putting the right groups of kids in front of the right novels.

STUART: Agreed. That's where our professional judgment based on our knowledge of the students comes into play. So how are they getting on with the skills?

Frank R. Paul [Public domain],
from Wikimedia Commons

(Our 3 adventures look towards the the Planning document projected onto the screen in front of them. Jabiz clicks the link to the POE for the unit and the key skills are highlighted as follows:

I can identify alternative interpretations of a text.

I can consider and use others' interpretation of a text to deepen or alter my own.

I can identify how an author has constructed a narrative point of view.

I can explain the impact of a narrative point of view on my interpretation.

I can identify examples and explain how the author creates voice through diction and literary techniques.

I can explain how the author's use of voice in the text has shaped my interpretation of the text.

JABIZ: Yeah, it all seems to be coming together. They're making the transfer from the class texts like I said.

IAN: I agree, but there's something bugging me. These skills all come from our Reading Standard and they all focus on craft skills that a writer uses when they construct a text. I think they're important but they're only part of the story.

JABIZ: (in a supportive and thoughtful tone - without nearly the level of exasperated condescension that might be expected towards a colleague who questions everything and uses conversation to sort out his ideas rather than taking the time to do it in the privacy of his own blog). This is what you were talking about yesterday when you were going on about the lack of Benchmarks to articulate the purpose of reading.

IAN: (oblivious) Yeah. This is part of the struggle I've had to explain the transition between "learning to read" in Primary School and "reading to learn" in High School. We're right in the middle of this process in Middle School and something hit me about the way our current unit is working.

STUART: Go on.

IAN: Well, all our Benchmarks at the moment are about craft - I know this isn't strictly accurate, but the emphasis is very much on how a writer writes. But that's not why I read books nor why I think writers write them. They write because they have something to say about the world and I read because I want to know what it is. How they write is interesting and important but it's not the main game. I don't think we teach English in High School primarily because we want students to know how to read and write but because we want students to use these understandings to engage with the cultural understandings that writers share.

STUART: You're right. This idea is stated clearly in all the position statements for English Curricula that we looked at when we started work on our curriculum but it seems to get lost when you get to the fine detail. All around the world English Curricula say things about focussing the ethical and social understandings of writers, but they struggle to articulate what this looks like when it comes to the specifics of what to teach in the classroom.

JABIZ: So is that our Standard "Humans use story to make sense of the world?"

STUART: Yes, I think it is.

IAN: Interesting that we articulated all our Standards around craft and that we haven't worked out what the details of our Standards around content are yet. There's something going on here about the way we think as a profession and as a culture about learning - what can be taught and measured etc. We go for the more easily measurable first.

STUART: Looks like the time is right to articulate this next Standard. I'll set up a meeting.

NARRATOR: And so the curtain falls on yet another curriculum adventure and our protagonists return to their classrooms a little wiser and with yet another meeting to attend.

The End

...o0o...

Humans use story to make sense of the world

Interestingly, when I went just now to look at the Australian Curriculum, there are Level Descriptors under the Literature Strand that say something about the content as opposed to the craft of writing but they are very much in the minority. Of the 10 Level descriptors for Grade 10, here are the two which I think are not primarily about craft:

Compare and evaluate a range of representations of individuals and groups in different historical, social and cultural contexts.  

Evaluate the social, moral and ethical positions represented in texts

And I wonder to what extent these Descriptors are engaging with the idea of story. Writers make a deliberate decision to write narrative rather than philosophy, for example. There is something in the nature of the narrative mode that represents an ordering of the world which is in contrast to a philosophic or analytical approach. I'm reminded of the line attributed to Novalis that 'poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.' My best students have always been those who can dance poetically with the texts they analyse.

I'm not sure what our articulation of "the world as story" will look like or even if it makes sense to "analyse" something which is assumed to be outside of "reason". What I love is that we have a process for trying and that I get to share in this adventure.

And I can't help wondering if we might be trying to articulate the wrong Standard. Perhaps the point isn't to make sense of the world but rather to enjoy it: it might be the playfulness that enters these stories that we make together - in our meetings and in our classrooms - that really matters. We spend so much time applying the scalpel of reason to our world and rewarding those who can cut with the most precision; perhaps what we need is a way to value those who heal with humour and playful subversion.

How on earth could we write an assessment criteria for "constructive subversion"?




*My argument is based on my areas of expertise in the liberal arts and specifically "subject English". Basil Bernstein in Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity argues that pedagogic practice is systematic across schools and, indeed, 'is a fundamental social context through which cultural reproduction-production takes place' (p. 3). According to Bernstein's formulation of cultural reproduction, the argument should be equally valid across the school curriculum but I don't feel that I have the expertise to speak other than tentatively about the experience of teaching and learning in other areas of the curriculum.

** Apologies to Stuart and Jabiz whose dialogue is in the spirit of our conversation but in no way accurate.