Developing a community of practice - part 2

In this post I describe my tute for my second group of pre-service teachers in the Professional Studies unit. It follows on from the last post where I reflected on my tuturial for my first group.

Last post I said the first tute seemed to confirm my sense of vocation for teaching teachers; the second made me seriously doubt it. I left feeling I had a lot of cheek standing up in front of prospective teachers and believing that who I was and what I knew was in anyway aligned to what they wanted and needed - which was to get out into prac with real students and real schools. I felt humbled.

Okay, so that was my typical angsty emotional response that Brookfield says we teachers can get into. Can critical reflection really stop the cycle of self-blame and help us into a a more useful perspective?

Some critical reflection

The whole experience brought back memories of my "difficult" maths students who had been so disempowered all through their schooling that they took on behaviours that continued to sabotage their learning. When I invited them to have a voice, debrief about past injustices and be part of negotiating the processes and content for their own learning I opened a floodgate. Suddenly I was the recipient of pent up anger and resentment. And once that was out of the way, we could move on and develop real relationships and learn how to help each other tune onto learning.

So when I gave my second group of pre-service teachers an opportunity to "really" explore what sort of community practice they wanted a whole lot of stuff came out about their whole course:

• a sense of disempowerment,
• a concern that the census date (which locks you into paying fees for the course) was before the pracs - so students could not test whether teaching was for them,
• concern that they were just overwhlemed by content after content with no space to digest,
  
• concern that simple basic needs such as sufficient break to eat lunch, walk around etc was not factored into their timetables.

My topic is based on the notion "we teach who we are." When I stand up within a classroom in a building I am more than this me, who is teaching. I am part of the systemic whole; the policies, the buildings, the timetable, the lack of access to water. I am complicit in it all. And while I might stand up and try to model a critical constructivist teaching philosophy, the environment that I am in teaches something different. It stands for something different - it teaches who it is - which is perhaps not the modelling we want our pre-service teachers to take with them into schools.

When I asked the course co-ordinator whether the students could have access to filtered water (the water in the building is problematic) she said that they had asked the university previously and were refused, because the uni management wanted students to go down to the ref in the union buildings to get access to food and water - so encouraging centrality of student mixing. Hello? Isn't access to water a basic human right?

So really what we are talking here about is making visible the set of values that are guiding educational decisions. Brookfield suggestes we need to challenge the assumptions of such values. The value of student mixing might be a good one, but we need to also ask, "what might be diminished if we whole heartedly privilege this view?" Perhaps each value comes with an opposite. Our role as teachers is to see the dilemmas, and then see the greater landscape. so rather just staying in complicit holding patterns we can begin to challenge those greater factors which conspire to detract from learning.

Reflection on critical reflection

Moving into a critical reflection stance has left me militant, and full of flem. I want to rebel, make waves, stand up for the rights of others, treat issues at their source.

Calm down, calm down. Is there another way? What is whole, good and beautiful in what we do and how can we build on this?

Parker Parmer says we need to take responsibility in owning all of ourselves - the shadow as well as the light, the fears as well as our gifts. How does a whole organization do this?

I am left with a feeling of asking, what is me, what isn't me? What can I change, what do we need to change? I am into teaching primarily because I want to transform the world, evolve consciousness, help heal society. I know that means a commitment to my own transformative journey and a commitment to engaging with many reflective lenses that can help challenge me and move me into new perspectives and insights. How do I invite others to join me, because I need partners in helping to create social transformation.

First step, a water cooler in the the education building.

Image Creative Commons: Robillard