Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Think "Hunger Games" meets "The Book Thief" with a touch of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" for good measure. This is a remarkable book that manages to be both compelling and engaging; exciting and thoughtful.

Set in 1956 in a world in which WWII was won by Hitler and Japan, the protagonist is a holocaust survivor who, as a result of experiments by a Mengele-like Nazi doctor, can shape-shift into different forms. Her task is to win a round the world motorbike race so that she can dance with Hitler and assassinate him. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it really works and Graudin's treatment of the history is sensitive and inquisitive. I particularly liked his postscript discussion of how and why we might usefully rethink history.

If this book doesn't end up as a blockbuster film, I'll eat an article of clothing.

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Dark Emu: Black seeds agriculture or accident? by Bruce Pascoe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This Christmas I visited a friend who gave me two precious things: a copy of Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu and an envelope of seeds from the daisy yam, Microsceris Lanceolata, known as “murnong" in the Boonwurrung language.

Dark Emu begins by challenging the received historical wisdom about Australian Aboriginal peoples which says that they were hunter-gatherers who lived opportunistically in a kind of harsh subsistence at the hands of nature. Pascoe argues that this description suited early settlers who wanted to see indigenous people as passive and childlike; unable to take responsibility for the land on which they wandered and undeserving of its possession.

By contrast, Pascoe shows a very different indigenous relationship to land and nature. Working systematically through early white accounts of contact with Aboriginal people and their land, Pascoe shows how accomplished Aboriginals were as farmers.

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/

w/index.php?curid=5603763

The daisy yam is a case in point. This highly nutritious tuber grew prolifically across much of southern Australia and was common in the areas south of Melbourne where I grew up. It is now rare. Within a few short years of white settlement in the mid 19th century, sheep had almost completely wiped it out.

It’s easy to take this history at face value and conclude that it was an unfortunate but relatively inconsequential side effect of agricultural development which caused the demise of the daisy yam. What this surface analysis hides is a much more complex understanding of the farming practices of Aboriginal people. When white settlers arrived, they saw an environment which they often described as “park-like”. Early descriptions I have read of the Mornington Peninsula talk about its open grasslands reminiscent of an English park. As a kid on weekend hikes battling my way through the thick scrub of the Otway Ranges, I remember being amazed to recall the stories of an elderly neighbour who had grown up in the area. He talked about the descriptions of the early bushmen who described the area as open and grassed, shaded by the enormous eucalypts that now were just stumps amid a younger generation of regrowth.

Pascoe shows that it wasn’t just sheep and logging that changed the environment but a loss of indigenous farming practices. Aboriginal people systematically burned and managed the environment to produce food sources when and where they needed them. The daisy yam requires a loose, friable soil and the harvesting practices supported regrowth and soil conservation in a form of sustainable agriculture which modern Australian farmers are only beginning to understand. Sheep ate the yams, but what was far more destructive was their trampling of the earth which prevented regrowth. Within a few years, parklands were replaced with compacted soils which encouraged erosion and supported far fewer animals - including sheep. Indigenous populations collapsed and their complex management of the land ended.

This story alone would make Dark Emu a compelling and important book to read but Pascoe’s analysis goes further:

Some say the idea that the world trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit and through that to political action, then the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture might be more readily explained. (p.136)

In the later part of the book, Pascoe explores visions and versions of what it means to live well. Against the history of Western imperialism, Pascoe contrasts at least 40,000 years of carefully evolved environmental understandings deeply embedded in the cultural practices of Aboriginal Australians. As the world looks forward to a more sustainable future through aspirations like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,  Dark Emu is a timely contribution to alternative views of history and a reminder that much of the knowledge we need may already exist.

I have passed my murnong seeds on to a colleague who will grow them with students at UWCSEA as part of a project to support natural diversity. I’m not hopeful that these temperate climate seeds will grow in the tropics of Singapore, but I hope to do my best to nurture the story they represent.

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Reading Advice for Parents

An article I wrote for our school eBrief with advice to parents on supporting reading

UWCSEA Library

With the December break only a week away, a question we are asked as English Teachers is “what can I do to support my son or daughter’s holiday reading?” In their final English classes of the term, students will be borrowing books to bring home, but you may also be thinking of buying books as presents or heading to the local library. Here’s a few thoughts and suggestions for choosing books.

Firstly, if a book engages and sustains reading then it is doing good. If a book is “boring,” it is probably at the wrong level. Our classroom libraries are stocked with books we know are great for Middle Schoolers but only some of our books are “just right” for your child at this moment. We work with the students to develop their skills for choosing the books that best engage and support their reading development but it’s not an exact science. If a book isn’t working, it’s important to try a different one.

If you’re looking for lists of good Middle School books, you can find a huge range on the UWCSEA East library site here. Notice that there are eBooks too. Many of the English staff have Goodreads accounts and we encourage our G8 students to use this site as well. You can find my reviews and scores for books in my classroom library on my Goodreads shelf here.

If you’re buying books as presents, consider buying a gift voucher (or eReader credits) to encourage your child to be involved in the process of exploring and choosing books. Exploring bookshops (or Amazon) is a valuable part of building a reading life.

UWCSEA library

Two final thoughts: sharing reading is both good for learning and good for family bonding. Reading stories to each other over the break is a wonderful thing to do. Secondly, if you have a long car trip, listening to an eBook or a podcast together in the car will make the journey shorter and build comprehension skills all at once.

And if you need to make space for new books, remember that the G6 and 7 Giving Tree focus this year is on books; we’d love to have your old books wrapped and ready to hand on to new readers.

On reading Shostakovich's pronouncements concerning "meaning in music".

In Soviet Russia

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24727079-symphony-for-the-city-of-the-dead

Under Stalin
When everything
Had meaning
But nothing
Made sense
Shostakovich was denounced
As "anti-people".

Stalin sat
At the Bolshoi,
Listened
To the music,
Stood
Half way through
And left.

An orchestrated
Moment perfectly timed
To set vibrations
Through the audience.

Shostakovich asks:
"What was the
Composer trying
To say?"
And answers:
"Questions are naive"

He asks:
"Can music
Be evil?"
"Can it make man
Stop and think?"

...

Each of us
Sits in the pits
Bowing our parts,
Playing to a wider
Score.

When the
End comes,
There is
A brief moment
Of silence;
We hold
Our breath
And wait
For a reaction.

What Brain Science might teach us about Conceptual Understanding.

Evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that one useful way to understand the brain is as a collection of modular units each evolved to solve particular functional challenges. Let me give an example: 

You’re standing on the curb ready to cross at the pedestrian lights on your way to work. The lights turn green and you start to step onto the road. Just as you step forward a flash of red in your peripheral vision causes you to step back quickly onto the curb.

Several things have happened in this scenario. Because you are familiar with the process of crossing roads and have crossed this road many times before, your brain is following a script for how to read the green light and where to walk. You do this relatively automatically, perhaps directing your attention to a podcast you’re listening to or thinking about your day ahead as you stand at the lights. When you step forward onto the road and the flash of red light is detected in your peripheral vision, another set of scripts come into play. You have learned that vehicles travel on this road and that they may approach fast and be dangerous. Your brain detects a possible danger and structures deep in the brain activate autonomic responses which cause you to jump backwards. Your heart rate is elevated, digestion is slowed, your pupils dilate and your body automatically prepares itself to respond to the threat. 

Activating your “fight or flight” response in this instance was a very good idea. Although this brain system is very primitive - your response was anatomically roughly the same as that of a dog or a lizard were they to have been crossing the road beside you - jumping out of the way of a bus has clear evolutionary advantages. Inside your brain are structures which evolved to keep you safe from predators but which are still clearly functional in the modern world. 

It is of course possible that the flash of red was not a bus. It might, for example, have been the reflection of a billboard on your new sunglasses. In this case you would have jumped for no good reason but you would still be alive. Over-reacting has only minor negative consequences. Under-reacting is potentially fatal.

Now consider this scenario:

You are at a football game dressed in the colours of your team, excited to have got rare tickets for this finals match. Last year your team also got into the finals and you also managed to get tickets for you and a couple of mates; you stood in the middle of the fans chanting and cheering and had a brilliant time feeling at one with the team. This year you got delayed and your mates arrived before you. In your hurry you went in through the wrong entrance and you’ve found yourself in the middle of the opposition fans. Nobody has said anything, but you feel like people are looking at you and you remain subdued. It’s too late in the match and things are too packed for you to move. You quietly take off you scarf and hat and put them in your bag as you watch. After the match you catch up with your mates for a drink at a local cafe. There’s a TV in the cafe and when an item comes on the news about refugees entering your country, you join your mates in complaining about refugees coming to your country rather than staying in their own.

Cognitive neuroscience shows us that, just as we have structures in our brains that are evolved to keep us safe from predators, so too we have structures evolved from our hunter-gatherer past to help us identify with our social group and make us wary of outsiders. In our evolutionary past, these structures served the purpose of creating strong bonds between group members leading to behaviours that increased the likelihood of individual tribes surviving. It’s probable that competition between tribes for limited resources meant that outsiders were often dangerous and it was wise to be wary.

In this instance, a deeply embedded evolutionary structure or “module” is very problematic in our modern world. Although we still enjoy and find comfort in tribal behaviours - such as supporting football teams - our world has evolved beyond tribalism but our brains are struggling to catch up. In our complex globalised world we need more than autonomic responses to enable us to live well together.

Conceptual Understanding

We perceive ourselves to be deliberately thinking about the world, sorting out the information available to us, and making considered decisions about what we will do next. Mostly this is wrong. Mostly our actions are determined by scripts and systems such as the one that saves you from being hit by a bus or causes you to chant and scream at a football match. Micheal Gazzaniga is one of many cognitive neuroscientists whose work shows that the basic architecture of the brain is not designed to work carefully through to a decision but rather to make predictions using existing scripts and modules to allow for quick responses which minimise cognitive load. The part of our brains that does the hard thinking work - our short term memories - is easily overwhelmed and needs shortcuts and supports to help it do its job. 

One way to think about education is that it is the deliberate front-loading of the scripts needed to allow us to function well.  In a cultural world which is evolving faster than our brain architecture, we need to be front-loading scripts which can be accessed to allow us to quickly navigate each new challenge as it faces us. These scripts range from narratives about good and evil which can front-load moral behaviours to strategies for approaching computational challenges such as which packet of breakfast cereal is better value. Extrapolating from the work of philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas and Amartya Sen, we can see that the process of reasoning through a solution to a particular problem is not something we do in our heads in the moment, rather it’s something that has been mostly done for us through the scripts we learn. Sen and Habermas argue that what is “reasoned” and “reasonable” is a culturally evolved negotiation between those who shape our cultural understandings. When we learn those scripts, we inherit those negotiated understandings.

Which brings me to the the idea of Conceptual Understanding in education. Here’s how I am increasingly finding myself to be understanding Conceptual Understanding: when we absorb the scripts of our culture, we are gaining Skills and Knowledge; when we learn that the scripts are scripts and that we can engage with them as constructed conventions, we have Conceptual Understanding. 

We can know that it is wrong to see people from a different cultural group as less human or less deserving than ourselves. Conceptual Understanding happens when we understand that racism is not just wrong, but complex and problematic and the result of culturally constructed scripts which have fuzzy boundaries and possibly some functional elements. Loving our own children more than the children of strangers is not wrong, but it is a script evolved from the same conceptual foundations as racism. Learning for Conceptual Understanding means that we are learning to have agency over the scripts which will shape our identity and our future impact on the world rather than simply learning the knowledge and skills that will shape us.

I wonder if we may often mistake Knowledge and Skills for Understanding in our work in education. In the vision of Conceptual Understanding that I am generating here, Understanding is as much a matter of our relationship to Knowledge and Skills as it is any particular educational acquisition; it has as much to do with agency as it does with how we organise information. Evolving beyond the limitations of our hunter-gatherer brains to have the agency to shape a better world, means working deliberately with our modular brains knowing how they work to keep us alive and understanding how we can work with them to make changes for the better.

Afterword

Whilst the specialisation of brain function is relatively well understood and foundational as a concept in psychology, modular brain theory is an emerging and more controversial development. The relationship between mind and brain implicit in modular brain theory can be described in multiple ways and, if Gazzaniga's book Human is anything to go on, there's a lot of very interesting work still to come. 

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.

Digging

Photo by Alistair Christie-Johnston
Peat in Shetland Islands

In my email this week was a message from my uncle who lives in the Shetland Islands, far to the 

north of Scotland. He sent me this picture of his “peat bank” and wrote that, between his peat bank and his million dollar view, he has a unique kind of wealth.

I sent him in return a poem by Seamus Heaney called “Digging” in which Heaney compares the work of his grandfather digging peat and his own work as a poet digging for the good earth with his pen. 

Heaney writes about the way we find meaning in our lives. His father, like his grandfather, dug ‘Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods /Over his shoulder, going down and down/ For the good turf. Digging.’ What I read in the poem is a celebration of the way we can find purpose in our lives and a humble respect from a nobel laureate for his labouring forefathers. 

Meaning emerges in this poem through the juxtaposition of shovel and pen. Nowhere does Heaney write explicitly about the way meaning and purpose can come through digging deeply into the rich earth of our cultural world, but the understandings emerge as carefully shaped as the peat sods his grandfather dug from Toner’s Bog.

I’m far from the poet Heaney is, but my most successful writing has these same characteristics. Meaning emerges through the cracks opened by a metaphor and, like Ted Hughes’ “Thought-fox”, wearily tests its vitality as it enters the space between my mind and yours. It seems to happen almost by accident; an emergent phenomenon as improbable as any other miraculous birth.

...

Words seem to me anything but ordinary. The very possibility of words producing meaning - let-alone creative meaning - seems so unlikely that it’s necessary to stop from time to time to marvel. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote somewhere that imagination is “like snow upon a river, a moment there then gone forever”. In a recent email to a friend I described the creative process as oddly woolly - like herding sheep with little sense of cohesion until suddenly and miraculously they’re all there neatly penned and staring back at you. 

This reflection was based on the experience I had while writing a poem. While I was riding to school I though of a metaphor: "a camera photographing itself in a mirror." I’d written the first half of this post and the ideas were still sloshing about in my head.

What’s interesting is the way the poem emerged. The metaphor was the heart of it. As my journey progressed, the second part of the poem - the idea of the complexity of the mechanisms that capture an image - began to form and when I arrived I sat in my classroom and wrote it down.

Here’s the interesting bit: only when I read what I’d written did much of the potential meaning come to light. The lovely paraphrase of Shakespeare’s line “signifying nothing” - echoing Macbeth’s soliloquy at the death of Lady Macbeth - was unconscious but powerfully apposite. I know the soliloquy, but I had not remembered its use of the metaphor of the “player”; the performer as mimesis, the signifier of a world who’s meaning is futile at best, and incomprehensible at worst. Shakespeare, the greatest interpreter of our world who reminds us at every turn of the futility of

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interpretation. 

The form of the poem as a mirror was deliberate because I wanted the two ends of the poem to reflect endlessly back to one another. Structurally, the poem is a deliberate nod to the philosophic idea of the hermeneutic circle. What emerged from this structural device was the word “beyond” which becomes a fulcrum for the poem. It was the power of this word and of it’s mediation through “nothing/ beyond/ perhaps” that struck me afterwards as powerful. I didn’t write this. These words and the meaning I find in them assembled themselves. 

And as always I am in awe of the power of our minds to dance with the world. From the blade of my uncle's shovel through the echoes of a Shakespearian soliloquy, the terrible beauty of our world assembles.

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)