Archive for category reflections

How about that virus huh?

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, personal, reflections, school, university on March 23, 2020

It’s a heck of a time to be an online teacher/writer and try to stay ‘on leave’. With the global disruption caused over the past week due to the pandemic spread of the COVID-19 virus, social media networks and backchannels have drawn me in to the common story. Teachers and parents are reaching out to talk – to vent – about the decision to keep Australian schools open (so far) and the workload involved in shifting learning online. Parents are totally overwhelmed at the thought of having to simultaneously home-school their children and either work from home, or deal with issues like sudden unemployment. Teachers are tackling twice the workload, producing classroom as well as online materials, and crumbling in tears on their kitchen floors at the impossibility of the task – they were already working at capacity or burning out.

This post is to share some thoughts on…

Online teaching:

Wow, teachers, you are in for an experience. That drawn, haggard look you have noticed hanging around your university teaching friends the past two or so years? That is in part because we have been increasingly moving our work online in ‘blended’ modes – teaching courses both on campus and via online delivery. It. Takes. Ages. To. Get. Online. Teaching. Right. It is hard and it takes ages. The tech fails, the learning curve is steep, you can’t produce everything you planned so are filling unexpected holes everywhere, all the time. It can take 10 hours to make one teaching video when you are still learning the ropes, is anyone factoring that in? In the university sector the mantra from the centre has more of less been: this is the way we work now. Deal with it, or find a new job. In higher ed, if we burn out, we’re just replaced. But there are SO MANY MORE teachers than academics! That workforce is irreplaceable. Education leaders can’t afford to have their heads in the sand on this one – teaching materials don’t just “go up online” like someone waved a magic wand. The labour involved is huge. Teachers, I would estimate you will need to take all your current plans for what can be delivered online, and start by halving it. Half the content, half the assessments, half the feedback, at least. Start getting real about this earlier rather than later.

Parents keeping their kids at home:

What a bloody disgrace to see some schools being heavy handed with parents and pressuring them to send their kids to school! Even this morning the QLD Education stance was that voluntary isolation is an “unacceptable” reason for an absence. Shame! And a shame to see so many QLD school leaders so completely under the thumb of their employer, so totally intimidated by the “don’t criticise your employer” mantra, that they won’t advocate in public for a softer approach on absenteeism. The NSW Department of Education had updated their absentee categories on Sentral by Friday afternoon to include an “acceptable” absence category for voluntary isolation, if QLD schools are to remain open they should also urgently follow suit.

Self care – it won’t be business as usual:

With the advantage of a month of LSL under my belt before any of this started, I can tell you I was already feeling unsettled by having to stop work. Although I had planned for the leave and taken it intentionally for the very purpose of slowing down, the actual slowing down wasn’t easy. We currently exist in a mesh of systems that are slowing down (working from home, businesses closing, grocery shelves emptying) and speeding up (keeping up with demand from clients/customers, panic buying) and it is going to feel as confusing as hell. I don’t know what Self Care in the Time of Iso looks like, but we’re going to have to work it out soon.

Yes, teaching is a social service:

A final thought about a common message I have seen this week – a lament that teachers are seen as “a social service, not an educational one” and that they are being used as “glorified babysitters”.

I do agree with the frustrated sentiment behind some of these laments and I think Steve Kolber summed feelings up well here in an article on 20th March: https://educationhq.com/news/another-stinging-insult-teachers-are-being-used-as-martyrs-in-covid-19-agenda-75456/. And yet… the phrase ‘in loco parentis’ plays on my mind. I’m not saying that teachers should feel obliged to work against their will or to put themselves at risk (they should not). I do think that school systems need to at least partially close soon, to allow a swathe of teachers to choose to work from home. But I do wonder why so many are surprised at the expectation that teachers act as frontline workers in a time of crisis, especially in public schools. In loco parentis – in place of a parent. It has always been my understanding that teaching is as much a ‘social’ service as an ‘educational’ one. I might have done more before now to make sure my pre-service teachers understood that too. I wish the government messages included acknowledgment of all this work and care without fear of the next enterprise bargaining agreement. They are so scared of having to pay teachers more if they acknowledge the depth of service they provide.

If you can support a teacher with a kind listening ear this week, please do.

There is also a new Instagram account you can follow to hear their stories: @from_teachers.

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I have no idea how to be on leave

Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, reflections on February 25, 2020

So, I am on Long Service Leave (LSL). If you don’t live in Australia and/or don’t know what that is, it is paid time off that your employer can give you after 10 years of work. The point of it is to have a short term break, so you can keep working in the long term. It’s to prevent you from getting knackered.

It is currently the start of week 4 of leave and I am finally getting slices of time with no work looming. Even though I’ve been on leave a few weeks, it will take another few weeks (I can see now) to resolve left-over deadlines and disentangle to various degrees from the multiple projects. It turns out that after 10 years work, there is a decent backlog of things to be finished, passed on, or discarded. All need sorting.

Things I will continue to do on leave include: volunteer committee work for ETAQ and QPF; supervision of three research students (meeting monthly); editorship of a scholarly journal.

Oh, and I am on leave for… FIVE MONTHS!

I took that sucker at half pay so I could stretch out the time off and boy I am so glad I did. If it takes about six weeks to really put the brakes on and be able to responsibly ‘down tools’, how ripped off would someone feel if their leave was only for 10 weeks! If you are reading this post and planning your own leave, let me highly recommend taking as long a break as you can, to compensate for your potential work hang over.

How do you like that term by the way? “Work hangover”. Also applies to the whole first week of any school holiday, in which we typically spend our time being sick or sleeping or drifting around in shell-shock. Surely someone has used it elsewhere, let me know in comments if you’ve heard it before.

I can see now that the best way to avoid the work hangover lag and get straight into leave would be to, well, leave. Go overseas, or outback, definitely off grid. Deadlines evaporate when you get properly out of range, but I am just here at my house, living the dream of getting up each day and not going to work. But for me the ‘get out of town immediately’ approach would have done more harm than good. I struggle to relax when I am stressed about the work I’ve left behind and I hate the feeling of coming back from ‘holiday land’ to the real world where the work sat and waited for me. No. For me this leave was a chance to clear the decks, so I will sacrifice these early weeks to do that, s l o w l y.

Anyway, to end this post I’ll return to what I came to say which is: this morning I have one of my first real mornings off. And I’m on my own, as hubby has a morning shift and kiddo is at school. And a little epiphany today is that I probably kept a few things on the boil because I don’t know how to “be on leave” and just “do nothing”. Is that even something that I have to have as a goal? Everyone seems to want that for me, but do I want to “do nothing”? I’m sure I’ll warm to it, work something out. It’s another big reason I took this break – to find out what happens in the absence of work. Who am I when I don’t work, that kind of thing. But yeah. I have no idea how to be on leave!

Advice, questions, or your own stories welcome in comments x

image: ‘alice was lucky’ by modeen19 via deviantart

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The concept of praxis

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, reflections, research, university on February 28, 2019

For me, demands to attend to the concept of ‘praxis’ in my work come from two main directions – my English educator community, and my Arts education colleagues.

This post captures my current ways of understanding praxis in relation to my work.

  1. Doing praxis means you are basically in a constant state of action research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_(process)#Education
  2. Praxis describes practice that is informed by theory, not generally, but purposefully (and perhaps systematically?)
  3. Praxis is underpinned by the belief that theory is understood through its realisation in practice, that proof of and improvements to theory are found in application
  4. So basically, all your practice gets explicitly framed by theory (and it’s therefore interesting to notice the texts and contexts that this ‘explicit’ framing happens through…is this also self-governance? is action research actually a self-review and reporting cycle to check for theoretical ‘compliance’, to conduct strategic planning in line with ‘vision and mission’??)
  5. …and you can reflect on your theoretical position by observing and analysing it’s application in your teaching (requiring a personal plan or framework for collecting valid evidence)
  6. It’s part of the answer to “so can I just tip a can of paint on a canvas and call it art?” – no. Artistry responds to other art, to discourses. Teaching becomes ‘art’ when there are processes for reflection
  7. In Vis Arts the VAPD is offered as a technology that enables praxis – study art, respond and experiment, create new art, repeat. This process became internalised, the VAPD supported cultivation of a praxis mindset/discipline. What does English offer? What does ITE offer English PSTs?
  8. How do the ruling texts of an institution shape praxis? Good question. Thinking about this.

Questions that linger:

  • How does praxis differ from “reflective practice”? (is it because the later divorces the elements ‘reflection’ and ‘action’, when they should always both be
  • This reminds me of the Action in/on Reflection scholarship from my undergrad/accreditation contexts. How is this different to ‘praxis’? Is Reflection in/on practice just the language teachers need to comprehend and embark on praxis?
  • How do practitioner inquiry and action research methods facilitate ‘praxis’?
  • Does changing the discourse from ‘praxis’ to ‘reflection’ constrain teacher agency? i.e. maybe reflection can be limited to self-reflection e.g. to better meet KPIs, doesn’t necessarily involve system-reflection or critical reflection…or this is an artificial distinction (?)
  • Do I vibe with project based learning because it scaffolds praxis instead of practice?
  • How are the praxis intensives at Bianca’s school more praxis-y than PBL (I think she and I agreed they are not more or less praxis-y, just needed a different name)? Is it problematic to label the week-long intensive projects ‘praxis’ if the received meaning is that other pedagogies (e.g. PBL) do not require praxis?
  • When you practice you are a practitioner, when you praxis (do praxis?) you are a …? Praxitioner? (note to self: praxitioner as #medium)

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Reporting phase: Semester 1 reflection

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, reflections, university on June 4, 2018

Vlogging project

In semester 1 this year (just finished!) I undertook making a few vlogs about my teaching experience as a lecturer at uni.

The results are here:

I’ll be using these vlog ‘reports’ as the source material for an end-of-semester reflection vlog. You are welcome to watch them in the meantime and add questions or ideas as comments to push my thinking.

Edu-tube community

One of the best parts of making these vlogs are the connections I am making with the Australian edu-tube community as I go. We have a decent sized Facebook group, a few of us are active on Twitter, and people are really good about watching and commenting on each others videos.

Some people are ‘teacher-tubers’, teachers who are currently working in schools and making YouTube videos about it (or for it). Others like me are educators from other contexts, from higher education, or community groups, the GLAM sector, public artists and art-based educators. We’re still feeling out the boundaries of this group, as a collective. It’s an energising space. A few of us are meeting up this year again at VidCon Australia.

One of my subscribers asked if I could make a video about how to do a 4-R style reflection, which I mentioned in one of the vlogs. This is definitely something I want to get to before semester 2 starts.

In the meantime, if you want to watch me trying to capture some teaching practice, be my guest:

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Thread: too much stuff

Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, reflections, social media on April 28, 2018

Captured Twitter thread, 16th April 2018:

too much stuff tweet thread April 2018

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Back to work 2018

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, personal, random, reflections on January 9, 2018

A re-tweet set from my feed to capture some 2018 ideas and intentions. Welcome back to work muggles!

2018 new year

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The QLD Year 12 Text Lists are Out!

Posted by kmcg2375 in english, HSC, QCE, reflections on December 5, 2017

Prescribed Text Lists have been created for the first time in Queensland year 12 English, to specify texts for study that have been deemed to have “merit in genre and style”. The lists have this week been made available to the public, after a week of being available to only QLD teachers and QCAA approved users (a contrast to how NSW HSC lists were released earlier this year to media in advance of teachers).

There are two texts lists for:

These lists correspond with syllabuses for the three ‘general’ (i.e. leading to an ATAR) courses. The syllabuses were finalised this year for use starting with with year 11 in 2019:

I recorded my initial responses to the text lists in this vlog, with more analysis to come in the next few weeks:

NB. Extension English syllabus and text list are on a later development round and yet to be finalised. Essential English is an ‘applied’ (non-ATAR) subject, and will not have an associated text prescriptions list.

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Why I still blog

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, personal, reflections, social media on September 16, 2017

This is my ninth year of blogging and I have just reached my 200th subscriber.

When I began blogging in June 2008 I managed to post nine posts in the first month. That’s heaps! I went back to browse them and was surprised – that I had written so much, but also that they were so short. These days I feel like everything I have to say needs so much explaining, so much backstory. It’s an occupational hazard. Writing lectures and research papers is wordy work, and that has truly seeped into all the other genres in my life.

Last weekend I was in Melbourne for VidCon, the first ever in Australia. It was amazing! More on that another time. And I met an excellent crowd of YouTube creators who are into education, and we had long and interesting talks. Getting to know each other, it was only when someone mentioned they have been blogging for a long time that I caught myself having not mentioned my blog. And I paused for thought. Then realised I hadn’t really, truly grasped the similarities between blogging (in which I am an old hand) and vlogging (in which I am a noob), until that moment.

(You mean I can transfer all this knowledge there? That is so darn handy right now.)

So, to articulate it for myself and others, here are the three big reasons why I still blog:

  1. I use the blog as a professional journal to reflect on my practice.
  2. I like to make a lot of my ideas and resources visible to others, because I trust the network and believe we are better when we share.
  3. The blog is like a pensieve. Or a portable hard drive for my mind.

ICYMI – in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Albus Dumbledore describes the penseive like this:

“I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

digital collage made by me using polyvore.com

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Dear Bianca: Semester 2 is about to start and…

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, reflections, research on July 21, 2017

…and I had promised you I would write back. This is probably going to be about my speed. Unless we pick up pace. Time will tell.

I honestly don’t know anyone who has gone to those research coursework seminars and felt differently. The stuff is always too general, but you’ve hit the nail on the head – it’s hard to do otherwise. With adult learners, that is.  Though I’m surprised you didn’t get credit for already doing similar courses, that’s a shame. The flipside is though, that you also typically learn something interesting or important at those things, even if you don’t know until way down the track how relevant some tidbit will turn out to be.

Like, that activity you described, where images are used as metaphors to get people talking about their feelings…that’s a cool idea. I plan to steal that. Thank you Sandy Shuck.

So, you seem pretty confident about conceptual frameworks, but can I ask you this – it’s the question I asked at the end of your blog post. Do you know the difference between a theoretical and a conceptual framework, and can you explain it? I had not honestly given enough though to the difference between the two. I looked back on my own thesis and found that I sectioned things out like this:

Chapter: Research Design.

Subheadings: ‘research issue and key questions’, ‘research framework’, ‘theoretical orientation’, ‘methodology’ and ‘methods’.

It got me wondering whether I just used non-standard headings for some things. That sounds like me. But also whether my ‘research framework’ was more or less conceptual or theoretical. One thing I do often wonder is how anyone can have a conceptual framework before having reviewed the relevant research literature. Surely it should go: lit review first, THEN select some research questions based on gaps in the field, THEN choose conceptual/theoretical frameworks and methodologies to best answer those questions, and THEN select methods suitable to collect and analyse data.

I wonder if you would like to share a part of your research proposal. I’m curious how you wrote up the bit about researching in your own school, and glad to hear you were satisfied with the direction you had worked on with Jane. Is it a…practitioner inquiry? case study? …?

Um, tips. You have to write. So write me back. It’s not a kind of writing you can rush. It’s good to have an audience in mind, so write me back.

In the spirit of that, I am also going to tell you in this letter about a thought I’ve had recently, and that I’m presently investigating for a research paper later this year. I’ve been thinking about the specifics of PBL and what the advantages of project-based vs other inquiry approaches (problem-based, challenge-based etc.) might be, in relation to democratic education. I still have no interest in trying to argue that project-based learning is ‘better than’  any other particular type of learning inquiry, but I do suspect it may be more democratic. This is based on the way PBL encourages and provides students with tools to frame their learning in the context of socially and textually authentic, personally relevant driving questions. At a gold standard it also incorporates opportunities for students to exercise choice and voice, and work toward presentation of a public product. Positioning students as knowledge creators, not just knowledge consumers, is vital here.

Here’s where you might take up the Dewey reading sooner rather than later, because that’s what I’m revising and I could use a buddy. What do you think PBL has to do with democratic education, or freedom? A question for another day maybe! I’d also like to attempt reading some of Garth Boomer’s work about English curriculum specifically, but because about to start semester 2, reading time is limited.

Your friend,

K.

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Teaching and work-life balance

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, personal, reflections, school, university on May 9, 2017

This week I’ve given my pre-service teachers this ‘wicked problem’ to start a conversation about work-life balance:

Imagine it is dinner time on Tuesday and you have three things to do before school tomorrow:

  1. Grade papers
  2. Meet a family/friend obligation
  3. Sleep

You only have time to accomplish 2/3 of these things.

Which thing do you drop?

The decisions and justifications that ensued were sufficiently terrifying. Don’t worry – I also had an excellent follow up discussion about all the joy and fulfillment that teaching brings to your life…

Overwhelmingly, students chose to drop sleep (if they were the kind of person who could handle that kind of thing), or family/friend obligations. Many justified their choice by explaining that family and friends would be understanding, and they’d ‘make it up to them’ later.

Some home truths I needed to explain after we had our discussion included:

  • This is a wicked problem that most teachers (and ALL beginning teachers) face down pretty much every single night. And every weekend. Basically, in every moment of spare time.
  • You can only run on a few hours sleep a night for so long. Driving while overtired can be as bad as driving drunk. Your body will kick your butt come holiday time and you WILL crash. You will also cope less well with this as you age.
  • Your friends and family will only put up with being neglected for so long. They will get tired of coming second best. Many will move on as a result. Where will that leave you?
  • The assertion that “I will not get myself into this situation” is naive. A beautiful and important goal, but naive.
  • The claim that you will get those papers knocked over in a couple of hours ignores the reality of many teachers’ work. English teachers especially mark long pieces of writing – like essays and short stories. You’re looking at around 30 mins per paper, so if you have even half a class to do, you’re looking at 7.5 hours marking work.
  • When you’re not marking, you’re planning. There’s. Always. Something.

The follow up sharing has come thick and fast.

Here is an explanation of the Four Burners Theory that one student shared. She wondered if maybe women generally feel more pressure than men to keep all four burners running, and burn out as a result.

One student shared information about music that is purposefully constructed to reduce stress.

This article bemoaning ‘mindset’ culture and the way ‘good teaching’ is conflated with ‘tired teachers’ serendipitously came across my feed that same week.

And, just to prove that when a message is needed, it comes from all angles…Steven Suptic even made a video that same week about being BURNED OUT from making videos.

I’d love to hear from teaching colleagues about their strategies for solving the wicked problem above. Or their struggles in attempting the same.

Postscript, 12th May: And wow, this post from Tomaz Lasic this week with advice for new teachers is solid gold.

 

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