Alien Pedagogy

(I just finished an AP course offered at Worcester in Oxford, England. The course was led by Jim Cross.)

One thing that I found compelling about Jim’s course was his content knowledge. For a while, I’ve been swayed by the bloggers that argue that teachers don’t need to know everything in a course to teach it — after all students can create it.

However, I was consistently surprised by the extent of Jim’s content knowledge and background. He knew his stuff. For example, he could tell stories about the biography of authors in order to get us to care about what that author produced as a text.

I was impressed.

(I just finished an AP course offered at Worcester in Oxford, England. The course was led by Jim Cross.)

One thing about the course that struck me very strongly was the artistry of our presenter’s curriculum. The internal mechanics of his course are so strong they reverberate throughout the year.

For example, while he teaches Heart of Darkness, he shows clips from Apocalypse Now to reinforce analysis of Conrad’s text.

Interestingly, he also teaches Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato, the students have already built up prior knowledge about Vietnam and can access the text all the more strong based on their previous study in the course — which makes making connections much easier.

Jim’s essential questions lead to themes that drive the course. They can be found in multiple texts, across the curriculum.

Intrepid Teacher posts here on how/ why teachers (especially literature/ LA) should be posting content online. It’s worth considering.

But aside from the argument, Intrepid Teacher is disappointed that he did not express himself as effectively as he could have. In my opinion, this happens when we do not take the time to practice presenting to a safe audience, which should be our faculty or department.

At my school, we spend quite a bit of time presenting ideas to each other. It’s something all of us should do more than once. What we currently lack is a feedback system.

Have you presented to your faculty? Do you have a feedback system?

Dr. Kim’s session “Facilitating Self-Reflection, Development, and Growth of Teachers Who Educate Abroad” was intended to be therapeautic. I didn’t read the summary, so I was surprised to find myself in a room full of teachers looking for release — I was the youngest person there by at least ten years.

We started by discussing what we thought we did well as teachers, which I found difficult to do without feeling pretentious. I went for energetic, which I think is honest. I could also have went for humorous.

After this, the session moved on to sharing things that caused teachers stress.

Here’s a summary of things that causes teachers stress:

• “My administrators don’t listen to me” was said by more than one teacher. In fact, a lot of hostility and frustration about admin was vented during this session. I can’t imagine a more thankless job than being a principal, but sometimes they don’t seem to listen so well. Interestingly, Dr. Kim was quick to point out that teachers often fail to listen to students.
• “All I do is work” was said by many teachers, which is true for me as well. I work so much that the main goal I’ve failed to achieve this year is seeing Hong Kong. At one point, a neighbor started “when I go home, the first thing I do is–” and I interrupted “check my work email!” So that was a great moment for me. I was surprised to find so many teachers talking about how they’d neglected to form long-term relationships or had chosen not to start families. Is this what I’ll become?
• Then the teachers with families spoke up, wondering why they aren’t given more time to work with their families — or skip a meeting. I heard at least one single teacher grumble at this.
• No teacher blamed students for causing stress.

In review:

• Dr. Kim was friendly and professional. And funny! She has a lot of personal anecdotes that are engaging and hilarious. I would definitely have stayed longer to hear more stories from her.
• At least half of the teachers in the room came in late, but Dr. Kim patiently invited newcomers to join a group each time they entered late. I’m not sure whether anyone else caught it, but she trained us to invite new comers to sit down — pretty sly, Dr. Kim.
• Dr. Kim had four slides during her presentation, each of them a symbolic image that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. She used this to generate responses to her questions, which I enjoyed.

Ultimately, the experience wasn’t what I expected, but it was cathartic. It was the last presentation that I went to, but I was glad that I went to see her present rather than going snorkeling with my friends.

Back in Hong Kong after the EARCOS 09 conference in Malaysia. I return feeling refreshed and inspired to start teaching again, though I wish that I could take a day to digest all of the information I’ve taken in.

A few quick highlights:

• UBD and Grading with the Powells was an amazing session, perhaps the high light of the conference.
• I went to Dr. Josephine Kim’s session for something different, but it turned out to one of the greatest presentations of the conference.
• I met and talked with several bloggers I’ve followed for months: Kim Cofino, Jeff Utecht, and Keri Lee Beasely.
• Web tools including delicious, Twitter, and Tinychat all enhanced this presentation and allowed me to connect with people that I might otherwise have been too shy to talk to.
• I spent the conference reading Into the Wild (and listening to Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack for the film), which was a surprisingly motivating counter point to the presentations.
• Four of the teachers from my school ran in the charity race. What an amazing collection of people we have at our school!

It’s my intention to blog my notes of each of the presentations that I took in during the next week.

Stay tuned.