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.

Venturer top secret by Ian f. Sime
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very much a book of its time, this is a rollicking yarn in the spirit of Biggles and the "Boy's Own" collections.

It's of particular interest to those connected to the heritage of Kurt Hahn as the author was a teacher at Gordonstoun School and the plot is loosely based on the voyage of the school's vessel, the "Prince Louis of Wales", during WWII. The archivist at Gordonstoun reports that the Prince Louis was sailed by a crew of boys with 4 professional sailors provided by the Blue Funnel line. She took three weeks to make the voyage from the Moray Firth in Scotland through the Caledonian Canal to Aberdovey in Wales and narrowly missed a ramming when she fell in with a blacked out convoy in the Irish Sea.

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Remnant

In the small patch of forest

Beside the new

HDB they’re building,

There’s a family of

Dogs that seem

Somehow to survive.

I see one standing

Sentinel sniffing the air

And watching warily

The towers of concrete

That slowly encroach

On his home.

Last night they chased me.

Three wild dogs barking

At my heels

As I pedalled down

The footpath, heart

Pounding, trying to look calm.

They didn’t bite

Despite my fears

And my vulnerability.

Instead they left me wondering

Whether the world will be better

When they’re gone.

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.

Christmas dinner

I've been writing alongside my Grade 6 students in their personal narrative unit. The Writing Workshop approach we use (from Columbia University's Teachers College Reading and Writing Project - TCRWP) encourages teachers to model writing for their students.

It's fun sharing writing with kids. I like the way they're so engaged by the fact that I am a writer, too. TCRWP cleverly encourages me to integrate particular skills into my writing just when students are ready to engage with them. In this story, I am writing about an event from my childhood - when I was about 10 - which I hope inspires students to think about similar times in their lives. We have been looking at how stories look to deeper themes to become more powerful. The kids told me they enjoyed this story but they want something a bit happier next time.

Christmas Dinner

My Uncle is holding the goose by its feet. It's upside-down and it's strangely calm as its head weaves around like an inquisitive snake. My uncle walks towards my father who is standing near the woodpile with the axe in his hand. I stand watching from the corner of the garden. My cousin stands beside me, quietly sobbing.

"Stop it," shouts my cousin, Andy. "You can't kill it." 

 My Uncle keeps walking.

"Quiet Andy," he says, "settle down."

He reaches the woodpile where my dad is waiting. Taking hold of the goose's head, he stretches its neck across the chopping block.

I turn away looking towards the other corner of the garden where two more geese have backed themselves against the fence. After the noise and flapping wings and running and hissing that accompanied our efforts to catch the first goose, their quiet watchfulness seems unsettling. 

I think back to when the geese arrived a week ago. Dropped off by a local farmer who wanted to give my father a Christmas present - something to say thank you for looking after his sick wife. Dad wasn't home of course. He'd arrive home late from the hospital and greet my mother in the usual way:

"Sorry I'm late, honey, been off saving lives."

I look again at the two geese in the corner watching my father.

It's Christmas tomorrow, but my cousin is quietly sobbing. 

 

 

 

 

 

The moral purpose of English

The house which my wife and I own is on the land of the Boon Wurrung people on what is now known as the Mornington Peninsula in the south east of Australia. We have owned the house for 15 years; they have owned the land for 40,000.

And already we enter a region of problems: "Ownership" is such a problematic term. When the first permanent settlement of Europeans was established in Boon Wurrung and neighbouring Wurundjeri territory in 1835, my white predecessors thought it just and proper to purchase the land they wanted to own. In exchange for scissors, blankets and an assortment of knives and mirrors, John Batman "bought" the land from Wurundjeri elders and laid the foundations for the city of Melbourne. Less than 50 years later, Jimmy Dunbar, the last full-blooded Boon Wurrung person, was dead.

Jimmy Dunbar

What killed the Boon Wurrung people was not primarily a failure of good intentions. This history certainly has its share of scurrilous individuals and acts of evil, but most of the white settlers did not wish their Boon Wurrung neighbours dead. Some of the settlers wrote with enlightenment sentiments about the Boon Wurrung as noble and aristocratic and relations between the two peoples were primarily peaceful. Germs played a major role in the deaths as diseases like smallpox, to which the whites had levels of immunity, ripped through the Boon Wurrung peoples, who did not.

The most devastating failure, however, was a failure of communication.

As James Cook had so presciently written in his journal whilst exploring the east coast of Australia in 1770,  the way the aboriginal people of northern Australia engaged with the world was profoundly different to the way Europeans did.

From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched People upon Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans, being wholy unacquainted not only with the Superfluous, but with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a

James Cook

Tranquility which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition. The earth and Sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for Life. They covet not Magnificient Houses, Household-stuff, etc.; they live in a Warm and fine Climate, and enjoy every wholesome Air, so that they have very little need of Cloathing; and this they seem to be fully sencible of, formany to whom we gave Cloth, etc., left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the Woods, as a thing they had no manner of use for; in short, they seem'd to set no Value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one Article we could offer them. This, in my opinion, Argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life, and that they have no Superfluities.

(James Cook: Journal Thursday 23rd August 1770)

When Europeans arrived in Australia, they couldn't see any fences and so they assumed that the land was not owned. The settlers on the Mornington Peninsula saw the "Black's Camps" but, as the Boon Wurrung didn't live in them permanently, they didn't understand the complex relationship between land and culture that characterises "ownership" for the Boon Wurrung. When the Europeans brought their sheep to eat the grasses that sustained the native animals and the daisy yam which was the staple of the Boon Wurrung, they didn't understand how their actions were appropriating not just Boon Wurrung food, but also the land which defined them. Ownership is about much more than fences, it's a complex set of understandings about how we can interact with the spaces and objects in our lives: the grammar of belonging is intricately woven from interactions and conventions.

The land was being re-written from the songlines of the Boon Wurrung to the languages of the Europeans. White settlers at the time noted that there were fewer and fewer babies  and it appears likely that, with no land to sustain their future identities, Boon Wurrung mothers took their babies into the bush and smothered them.

Ultimately, the loss of so many Boon Wurrung lives and so much culture, is partly a failure of communication. A failure of the Europeans to understand the Boon Wurrung and a failure of the Boon Wurrung to understand the Europeans; a failure of the Europeans to communicate their culture and values to the Boon Wurrung and a failure of the Boon Wurrung to communicate their culture and values to the Europeans.

As a white Australian male, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells me that my life expectancy is about 80 years. Aboriginal Australian males can expect to live for about 14 years less. Clearly we are still struggling to communicate and understand.


..........


These reflections were inspired by some work we have been doing at UWCSEA to make better use of data as we assess the impact of our teaching. It may seem a bit of a stretch to be relating good teaching practice to the history of race relations in Australia; what prompted the connection in my mind was a question from a colleague about "moral purpose"- he invited us to frame our research around a common understanding of the moral purpose of our teaching of English.

For me, the moral purpose of teaching communication is clear and compelling: if we are to live in a world which is peaceful and just, we need highly developed skills for communication. We need to know how to read and write the contexts of our interactions in ways that a complex, empathetic and insightful. The hard work of living well together is built on a foundation of good communication and building this foundation is our moral purpose.

Two seats

It's a bit impertinent

To write this

When I

Didn't know you

That well

But I read

Your books

And taught your son

And you gave me a

Collection of your writing

So I thought I could give

You this in return.

You wrote about

Soundings -

Sailors taking soundings

Trying to fathom

The depths of

Meaning in the place

We both lived.

I loved the masterful

Elegance of

Your art form:

Swinging the lead

And letting it fly

At just the right

Moment so that it

Hit the water

Far enough for'ard

For the lead to touch

Bottom just

As the line

Became vertical.

Timing: a split second

To fathom meaning

And make sense

Of the darkness

Beneath.

...

Your two seats

Were like all the rest

In that instant

Before whatever

Political stupidity

Turned a flight

I knew nothing about

Into one

about which

I knew too much.

It was intermission
When I looked at my
Phone. Ballet
In the park. The
Twist and turn of bodies
Beautiful
Until it is shattered
By the news.

I can't make sense

Of it.

A line

Of words

Trying to sound

Depths which are

Immeasurable.

For Liam and Frankie Davison 17th July 2014