Introduction to Sociocultural Politics in Education

Politics plays a pivotal role in education, as it is the Politicians who determine the allocation of funding for education, for individual states/territories and for specific schools therein. The community view of education and schools is, in part, determined by these politics of funding; it can be inferred that those schools receiving the most money are those worth valuing, or equally, that those receieving the most monetary input are sub-par and require improvement. The school comparative achievements and rankings listed on the Government MySchool website are based on NAPLAN data, SES, enrolments, attendance, gender and completion rates, and these figures are used as a basis for community opinion of the quality of the school. This is a prime example of the influence that politics has on the valuing of education, and the implications of using measures of so-called ‘comparative data’ to assess a school.

My initial response to the name of this class included, among other thoughts, “here we go: provocative, rage-fuelling, politically incorrect statements to abound, hold on to you hats, folks!” In all seriousness, though, I have no issue discussing such topics, nor do I have any qualms debating and discussing differences in opinion – in fact, I find it fascinating – but I know that many individuals are cagey about sociocultural issues, particularly their own perspectives, and thus I can foresee some ill-fated statements spiralling into emotion-charged arguments. And, let’s face it, there are some people who actually aim to be provocative, and hair-trigger topics lend themselves to such successful bating. I would like to think that only emotion-charged debates will take place, and that everyone will show respect for every other person’s point of view, but I have been disappointed before…

In my mind the term sociocultural encompasses many facets of society, including, most obviously, the culture. However, the race, religion, class, beliefs, practices, gender, sexuality, creed etc. are all implicit in this term, and thus the basis for discussion is nebulous. With a particular interest and investment in Indigenous education I am greatly looking forward to exploring this topic, especially as I feel a growing sense within myself that teaching in the middle of the Red Centre better represents my teaching aspirations than does teaching in a newly furnished, sparkling clean laboratory in Canberra’s leafy inner-north (but that is another discussion, for another post). Related to my interest in Indigenous education and the issues therein is the inherent inequity in Australia’s education system – and I believe both SCPE and RINE (Responding to Individual Needs in Education) will touch on this.

What I found to be a fascinating sticking point from yesterday’s introductory lecture, however, was the statement regarding identifying our personal cultural practices. When I was in Africa I was asked by Americans, Brits and Africans to share some ‘Australian culture’ with them – and I was at a loss to do so. Pavlova? Hills Hoist washing lines?Painting flags on faces? Beach cricket? Throwing shrimps on barbies? Shortening words unnecessarily, such as servo (service station), u-ey (u-turn), pluggers (thongs)? In all honesty I am not proud to claim most of these things as ‘Australian’, but I am even less inclined to describe them as part of our ‘culture’. It was highlighted that not being able to readily identify cultural practices is likely a result of being a part of the dominant culture, as the unnamed is the norm, and the exception proves the rule. This explains my inability to identify aspects of the ‘Australian culture’, but I have been informed by an International Australian resident that he, too, finds it difficult to isolate what constitutes as the Australian culture. I will be interested to see how my understanding of this premise develops over the course of the class.

When considering Indigenous education in the context of SCPE I was drawn to consider other so-called “Indigenous Issues” also: the statistics quoted about their low academic achievement and school attendance, their poor living conditions and overall health, their decreased life expectancy, and their general inequitable treatment in society. The Government, in an attempt to abate these shameful statistics, was driven to implement the NT Intervention – with what has been described as a resounding failure by many affected individuals (and, to be fair, has been labelled a success by others). I feel very strongly about the need to address the disparity between the health, education and opportunity of European and Indigenous Australians, as the right to a successful and healthy future should not be determined by race, but a question has been tugging at the corner of my mind for a couple of days, and surfaced in earnest this morning: success according to who?

Indigenous students do not achieve as highly on NAPLAN tests? Their literacy and numeracy is lower than the national average? Their task comprehension is lower than their peers? They are less successful? But success is a relative measure, as is what to place importance on and what to disregard. Indigenous cultures are not English-based, they do not historically value televisions, money or facebook – they do not complete standardised tests to measure comparative proficiency in written comprehension. What they do value (please feel free to correct any inaccuracies here) is their community, their family, their history, their land, their heritage, their culture. Who are we to label them as ‘unsuccessful’? What European-based education system has the right to judge the performance of people from other cultures? What measure of success is this, really? I am quite certain that I would fail a test set by the Ngunnawal peoples regarding what they value: should I, too, be regarded as a low-achieving, ‘at-risk’ individual who has limited chance of succeeding in life? How can this possibly be an equitable society when the dominant culture judges the success of individuals on how well they have assimilated into it? Assimilation is not inclusion. Attending school is compulsory (and in some cases, welfare payments to the family now depend on it), and I am not juxtaposing that this should be revoked; what I do know, however, is that what to explore, what to learn, what to study at school, what to value should be a decision made by the individual, and not something thrust upon them by an education system designed by the dominant culture in a society.

Unfortunately, I can proffer no solutions, provide no remedies, fix no problems; at this stage of my education career all I can state is that the status quo is not inclusive, and that it is not acceptable.

Sociocultural politics of education: I believe over the next nine weeks we shall have an interesting time together.

– For Science!

Return to the Grad Dip: Teaching Literacy

Isn’t spending time teaching literacy just a distraction from our core disciplinary business?

One of our classes this semester will centre on exploring this question, delving into its implications for our KLAs, our profession, our classes, our personal teaching journeys, our students’ learning, our understanding of literacy and its role in education (and by extension, really, the world). I want to preliminarily explore this from the point of view of my changing perception of literacy and numeracy – and indeed education as an entity – based on the interaction between my assumptions and the Grad Dip course.

My Grad Dip journey began with an open mind, but I later realised it was open to only certain types of information: the ‘useful stuff’. I had devised a mental filter that allowed through only those thoughts, ideas and concepts that conformed to an arbitrarily designated size and shape – and I was unaware that I had done this. For the first five weeks of this course I was not ‘feeling it’. I was not connecting with the content material, the course structure, my role in education or my purpose for studying it, and as such was feeling little other than lost. I was drowning in an ocean drop, suffocating on a desert grain. But what I did feel at that point was some sort of connection with the lecturers of the course – the overarching driving force behind our teacher education. In ‘Contextual Healing’ (week 4) I blogged:

“The Strike Team generate such a lasting impact on us all, through their dedication, passion and superhuman ability to be on-call 24/7, I can only admire the evidently masterful grasp they have of their crafts. If nothing else, I look to them and am reminded that the forest, visible or no, is worth trying to find.”

Despite my inability to see the forest for all of the trees, I felt an innate need to keep searching, and I am quite certain that it is due in no small part to the joy for teaching that is constantly modelled by our lecturers.

It was after week 5 that I reached a turning-point: the moment passed and all in a rush there was sense to be made of this Grad Dip journey! It became less about listening and filtering out information, less about seeking out only the ‘useful stuff’, and more about absorbing as much as I could, and actively, passively and unconsciously drawing connections between the nebulous issues presented to us. Since experiencing this startling crystallising moment my thinking has been irreversibly altered – I now see teaching in everything, and thus I now feel as though my literacy in this Grad Dip course has increased.

However, my previous definition of literacy was informed by my personal experiences of education, and as such was not a very balanced view. During my schooling I participated in the ACT testing program called ACTAP, which has now (de)evolved into the infamous NAPLAN testing. Our literacy and numeracy was being tested on a national scale, providing a relative rank of our ability in these areas; my ability to read, comprehend, analyse, spell, construct, deduce, create and narrate was tested in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 under this guise of literacy assessment. I achieved highly, and thus thought no more on the matter of ‘literacy’ – clearly my high ranking meant that I did not need to expend energy considering it further, as I had already conquered it…oh the folly of youth!
And until undertaking the Grad Dip I had not considered it again in great detail – literacy only surfaced on the odd occasion that the use of NAPLAN data for ranking school and teacher performance came up in conversation.

I have realised all of this only because I have brought myself to ruminate upon the concept of literacy and its role in education, and despite previously assuming that I had conquered it, I have come to see that literacy is a pervasive, divisive and inextricable issue in education. Literacy is not, as my Year 3 mind believed, limited to the ability to fill in the missing word in a sentence, identify the noun and verb in a statement, or generate a phrase including the word ‘very’: literacy is the ability to read the question, to understand the context, to infer the background information, to perceive the purpose, to know the why, what, who, when, where and how. Interestingly, Dictionary.com defines literacy thusly:

lit·er·a·cy (noun)

1. the quality or state of being literate, especially the ability to read and write.

2. possession of education: to question someone’s literacy.

3. a person’s knowledge of a particular subject or field: to acquire computer literacy.

My attention was automatically drawn to definitions 2 and 3, as they are overtly and covertly pertinent to the student teacher’s understanding of literacy, but all of these definitions encompass more than simply ‘reading and writing’, which the general populace perceive its major function to be. Literacy is implicit and imperative to every KLA: it is crucial to the comprehension and appreciation of every subject, and is in fact actively, passively and unconsciously taught in every one of them also. Teachers teach literacy without realising it, and students become more literate without realising it, too. But this does not mean that literacy is necessarily transferrable between KLAs: a student who achieves highly in the Humanities, and is thought of as having well developed literary skills,  may in fact be dumbfounded by the ‘language’ used in Science, PE, Metalwork, Music etc. Familiarity with literary works, essay writing, journalling, poetry creation: these skills may increase one’s literacy but it is the ability to apply them in other disciplines that truly denotes one’s proficiency.

In reading the beginnings of our textbook, Cris Tovani’s “Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?”, I have found this premise is already touched upon, in the form of her grappling with the relevance of a scientific article. She is a learned persona in literary and educative circles, and yet she failed to see the importance, relevance, purpose or intrigue in an article about viruses – and so, too, did the class that she was attempting to excite about it. However, she was tasked with engaging them and thus that is how she proceeded; having identified the relevance of the article to her own life she was then able to apply her literary acumen to this previously impenetrable task. But the key to unlocking this process, I believe, was the need to first highlight a purpose for doing so, in the form of the importance that it holds, or the relevance that it has, to the individual’s life. Literate people can still be overcome by irrelevant and unengaging material, and thus this step must be executed first to ensure the reader has a point from which to ‘attack’ the piece of work.

This links to the use of discipline-specific ‘jargon’: the terminology specific to, or with different implied meaning in, the area from which the work was generated. Science presents a classic example of seemingly unapproachable language littering a written work – in fact, it was not uncommon for a required reading for my undergraduate courses to include the terms racemate, chiral, diastereomers, enantiomers, plane polarised light, ligands, conformers, steric arrangement, kinetic product, thermodynamic product, entropy, Gibbs Free Energy, electron donation, electron density etc. I am aware of the intimidating nature of these words, as their esoteric meanings relate only to a narrow field of metal-based chemistry, but such jargon exists in every discipline. In English, for example, the terms soliloquy, iambic pentameter, Haiku, prose, device, metaphor, simile, syllable, rhythm, couplet, sonnet, stanza etc. can present an equally off-putting introduction to poetry. To break through this barrier one must first identify a reason to do so, and then it becomes a matter of course to decipher the language used within.

I have no personal experience with literacy difficulties, and thus was never aware that many classroom disruptions are a result of a student’s fear of being ‘found out’. With the gift of 20/20 hindsight vision, this makes sense in the context of my classes at school, and yet I was completely oblivious to this tumultuous struggle occurring in the corner of the room – and perhaps the teachers were, too.

As a teacher’s core business is to educate, inspire and encourage their students to achieve to their highest potential, it is implicit, then, that the thread of literacy is conceptually, physically, emotionally and practicably interwoven into the fabric of education. Perhaps we should not question the intricacy of each discipline’s quilt patch individually, but instead marvel at the connectivity that underlies the splendour of the quilt as a whole.

– For Sceince!