Upon reading one of my lecturer’s wonderfully insightful and provocative blog posts I felt the need to respond – and although the content veers tangentially away from his main purpose for writing it, the inherent element of meta-cognition has awakened some parts of my thinking that have been lying dormant, patiently waiting for a time to emerge when I was ready to deal with them. They have been tugging at the corner of my subconscious for a number of weeks, but have yet to be adequately acknowledged – until now…there is always so much contemplate!
“To learn to teach is to belong to, and draw upon, a community of thinkers-and-doers. The hyphens remind us that this is one set of people, not (as some would have it) a world divided into two groups, the thinkers and the doers. These thinkers-and-doers include our teachers, our parents, our former teachers, our fellow students and teaching colleagues, the authors of the books we read, the presenters of the courses we attend.”
I was so exalted to read this description, as I feel that society creates such limiting and short-sighted constructs that the population feels obligated to fit into them. There is often no possibility of cross-category liaison or information exchange in the sense that the doers could not possibly learn anything from the thinkers, and visa versa, as they have different roles and therefore different activities to undergo. How could doing something assist in one’s thinking about it?How could thinking something assist in one’s doing it? And yet, the two are so very interconnected that I would argue it is nigh on impossible to adequately fulfil either task without referencing the other – and thus is the basis for the mentality that theory informs practice. This does not necessarily mean that theory must precede practice, but it does mean that the recipe for success involves both.
12 months ago my main teaching ambition was centred on being accepted into the 2-year program entitled “Teach For Australia“, whereupon successful completion awards the participant a Diploma in teaching and two years of on-the-job experience in a “disadvantaged” school in Australia. This seemed like the most amazing opportunity and fulfilled so many of my desired criteria – teaching qualification, practical experience, work in remote areas – that I decided that it was a non-negotiable goal. I did not look upon this as an easy objective, but I did believe that I would be ready to teach without any introductory training (oh the folly of youth!), although there is a six-week introductory training course. But times, how they change, and cutting a long, involved story short, I ended up enrolling in the Dip Ed I am currently studying. And oh, how my perspective on that program has changed! How on Earth could I have hoped to succeed in any capacity with no theory informing my practice? I may have succeeded in making a child laugh, or in making myself feel like I was achieving my goals, or in making personal revelations, or perhaps even conveying knowledge to someone, but I can, without any doubt, conclude that I would not have truly taught those students in a meaningful manner without starting from a somewhat informed viewpoint. I would have entered that classroom flying blind, with no vision and no co-pilot, and been expecting to make it through the turbulence unscathed, landing on the run-way after two years of relative smooth sailing…what was I thinking?! It is not until one begins to study teaching that one realises how little one genuinely understands it, and it is this daunting, unsettling, and most uncomfortable transition to conscious incompetence that is the point at which the real learning begins.
A teacher must be a thinker-and-doer by the very nature of their career, and I think it is worth taking stock of this at the end of a hard day. Reflecting upon this yields that successful teaching requires a level of developmental maturity to realise that there is always a meaning in an action, and a theory in a practice.
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“To be in the grip of the scientific metaphor is to be made to feel uneasy about the fact that intuitively we know we learn from our colleagues and from our practice. If my student could more easily allow himself to be invaded by the ‘learning communities’ metaphor, he would know he could draw on his fellow students’ blogs if indeed they help him to understand, and to act effectively in, the complex ‘indeterminate zones of practice’.”
I do not consider myself a scientist in the sense that resonates with society; I do not inhabit a lab coat five days per week, I do not spend my days pipetting coloured liquids into trays upon trays of sample vials, I do not make a habit of breeding albino rats for experimentation, my time is not occupied by analysing endless data files and graphs, I am not required to douse and scour my person before entering my workplace, I am not found hunched over a large and expensive piece of equipment on a daily basis. I am not a stereotypical scientist as the media portrays us – although these scientific endeavours are wholly valuable and worthwhile career pursuits – and yet, I do refer to myself as a scientist, and I see myself as one: I look for the science in the world, seeking out the amazingly embedded yet prominent scientific basis in everything in my life, and thus my outlook on life is science! – and what is more scientific than that?
I know many individuals who would argue with this definition and reasoning, and possibly rightly so; albeit, science is such a salient and integral part of my life that I feel I cannot fully encapsulate myself using any other term, and thus I continue to appropriate it for my own purposes.
This, however, raises a separate ‘kind of science’ from that referenced above, and yet they are wholly related. “To be in the grip of the scientific metaphor is to be made to feel uneasy about the fact that intuitively we know we learn from our colleagues and from our practice.” I know the truth in these words, and yet this learning, this understanding, this knowing is not undertaken in a scientifically rigorous manner – does this mean it is necessarily rendered invalid, unusable, unreliable? As a joyously self-proclaimed scientist, must I undertake ‘research’ upon which to base any so-called knowledge that I come to ‘know’? Must I reference my teaching practice, and employ only those methods proffered in ‘academic journals’? Must the anecdotal be ignored? Must we rally against the spread of a socially constructed nature of knowledge? To these ideas the reflectivist and scientist in me both say a resounding, “No!”
Humanity was founded on the activity of tribal groups who survived, subsequently sharing this knowledge of survival, reality and history between generations and amongst community members – we were born of communal functionality. Our reality may have altered significantly from that of the ancestral hominids speaking, singing, dancing, surviving and learning on the plains of Africa, but the ability and propensity to share knowledge has never been more immediate as it is today. Our community has broadened to international horizons; our survival has altered from run-survive, hunt-kill to survival in the constructs of modern civilisation (in the West/First World, at least); our history has seen advancement, tragedy, wonderment, genius, pain, suffering and above all else, humanity; and what has remained stoically unchanged throughout this time is that salient, flawed and defining construct that is our humanity. And we know this because our ancestors communicated this to us. Anecdotes, stories, embellishments, fabrications, forgotten events, contradictory accounts, language, art, discoveries, technology – inter-written into all of these abstract and tangible media is the history of the human journey…and I do not know this because it was cited by seven respected scholars – I know this because I am human and it is as much my story as it is yours.
To think about this knowledge, to understand its meaning and to enact its purpose is surely the way that our community (society) has operated from its very origin? The thinkers-and-doers of the world understand this in some capacity – be they scientists, bakers or electricians – and are therefore not limited or contained by the walls of the science metaphor.
I am a scientist, I am a teacher-in-training, and I am always learning – and that in and of itself opens so many doors to accessing knowledge, with innumerable purposes and from myriad sources, each with its own relevance or lack thereof, to be determined by the individual seeking out the knowledge. Every referenced article itself was seeded by an ‘idea’ that was generated from contemplation of current knowledge, and was constructed around this established ‘known’. Ultimately, regardless of its source, through collation of information, review of data, experimental observation, disproving and supporting theories and hypotheses, thinking about the world in a different manner, problem solving, and intellectual inquiry, all knowledge is constructed – and that means we all contribute to its existence.
– For Science!
Synergistic Bonding in the Classroom! 