I just made a PechaKucha last night about different forms of schooling. First let me say, I had no idea it was that difficult to record audio. Especially if you want it to be perfect. Even then, some of the audio was flawed.
In my discovery of the issues and problems with schooling, I went on a search for different forms. It started with Marie Battiste's book "Decolonizing Education" and her mention of the Maori and schooling. It got me thinking about the paper I wrote about the Inuit and how they are trying to do some of the same things that the Maori did because it was so effective. Since it's a fairly new thing in the Arctic, a lot of work remains but I have high hopes they will succeed. They have already succeeded in making sure that their language is respected and some of their culture leaks into the school system. However, being a teacher up there taught me that euro-centrism is alive and well in the administrations and teaching staff and that will be very difficult to fix if more Inuit people do not become teachers. A lot of the admin and teachers I worked with in each school tried to replicate southern schools. I mean, of course they did...that's all we knew. A very few had managed to balance the two but none were able to fully embrace the Inuit culture in the schools and do things in ways that the Inuit would do. It might have been the curriculum and it may have been the class sizes. In a school in southern BC on a reservation, I was a science teacher. One of the women healers asked me to research ethnobotany and help her incorporate it into the school science program to build respect for her craft. So I did. Apparently I was the first science teacher that recognized ethnobotany as 'real science'. I stay convinced that if schooling is to really serve people: any people, that we are going to have to change how to do things. Some are already doing it. Sudbury schooling in the USA, the Inuit initiatives in the far north that will ensure the survival of their language and respect for their way of life, the Maori, multiple small schools across Canada on reserves and off that are trying new forms of schooling in order to truly serve people, truly teach them useful things. I wonder sometimes if we need to move away from curriculum based learning and into something more organic and holistic. I certainly would send my son to a school like that because I don't think the way they teach in elementary schools serves a lot of the children there. I know that in my own classrooms it is very difficult to do anything but to teach to the middle. The ones that are too fast, too smart, too interested or lacking in those things are difficult in classrooms where there are 30 students. Maybe I haven't mastered the 'differentiation' that is seen as the way to fix these issues (that rarely works, in my experience). I have enjoyed this course (it's almost over). I enjoyed the freedom to research what I was interested in and incorporate it into my learning from the course work. At the beginning of the course I was feeling guilty about reading Gatto, Holt and Illich because I felt I should be reading other things, works that were required by the course work. I read those too eventually but while reading Marie Battiste's book I realized that it fit really well. That taking the ideas from the unschooling sector made me question everything, not take any part of the schooling experience for granted and this created a mindset that made me want to reach out to other ways of schooling children. I'm not entirely convinced that schooling is necessary for education (Gatto is a very compelling writer). But I have since met many, many people both aboriginal and non aboriginal that believes schooling is necessary for life. At a parent teacher interview the other day, a parent explained why she wanted her daughter to 'get an education' at school and it was because in her job, she has been barred from rising higher because she didn't get her high-school diploma. So even though I question schooling, I see that other people think it's necessary and I could very well be thinking from a middle class bias. It's easy to question the status quo when you have a higher education yourself, isn't it? Anyway, back to the point: I have enjoyed this course. I feel like I learned a mountain of information in a very short time. I have also taken the methods of evaluation and assessment and incorporated into my own courses. They are having the same struggles as I did at first and now know that the assessment method is a learning curve itself. In short, Thank you Evie for teaching me so much. Cheers, Golda
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AuthorMasters in Education student at the University of New Brunswick, I am avidly interested in the future of education, especially for First Nation, Metis and Inuit students in Canada. I believe change is going to come from these sectors who have the most room for growth and the most interest in seeing the status quo changed. Archives
March 2016
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