Archive for category university

Noam Chomsky on the Role of the Educational System

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, politics, university on November 11, 2010

Chomsky argues that schools are a system of indoctrination of the young:

Even the fact that the system has a lot of stupidity in it, I think has a function.  You know, it means that people are filtered out for obedience.  If you can guarantee lots of stupidity in the educational system, you know like stupid assignments and things like that, you know that the only people who’ll make it through are like me, and like most of you I guess, who are willing to do it no matter how stupid it is, because we want to go to the next step.  So you may know that this assignment is idiotic and the guy up there couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag, but you’ll do it anyway because that’s the way you get to the next class and you want to ‘make it’ and so on and so forth.

Well there are people who don’t do that, you know.  There are people who say ‘I’m not gonna do it, it’s too ridiculous’.  Those people are called behavioural problems.

Thanks for the link Bianca – I love getting angry with Noam.

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Best teacher movies of all time

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, university on September 25, 2010

I have always wanted to design a pre-service teaching unit based around a reflection on a range of ‘teacher movies’.

We all know the kind: teacher finds themselves out of their depth, but then struggles against the establishment and/or personal odds to overcome adversity and transform the futures of a group of wonderful young people we come to know and love.  Oh, and there’s usually some kind of tragedy, you know, to make a point.

Here in no particular order are my top five teacher movies of all time:

  • Dangerous Minds (starring Mchelle Pfeiffer)
  • Dead Poet’s Society (starring Robin Williams)
  • The Breakfast Club (the John Hughes classic)
  • Mr Holland’s Opus (starring Richard Dreyfuss)
  • Coach Carter (starring Samuel L Jackson)

It would be a great unit: 10 weeks, 5 movies, 1 week watch the film and set readings, next week do a critical analysis.  It would draw in sociology, philosophy, productive pedagogy, and some psychology too, especially around theories of motivation.

Hands up who wants to do my course!

Are there other movies you would suggest?

PS: I spy with my little eye…students from QUT checking out my blog!

Hello, and welcome 😀  Please feel free to add comments on any post.  There is also a ‘blogroll’ on the right of the screen where you can find links to other blogs that I have liked to read.

Blogging is a great way to share your ideas with others, but also to process your own experience and support your reflective practice.

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Australian Children’s Literature

Posted by kmcg2375 in books, english, online tools, university on September 17, 2010

I have recently joined a team of people at QUT who are starting to develop some English teaching resources for the digital Australian Children’s Literature resource on the Austlit website.

AustLit is currently available at “almost all universities and research libraries around Australia, many municipal libraries and at some universities and research libraries internationally.”

As I started to look into the area today, I became more and more interested in the idea of exploring Australian children’s literature.  I wonder how many old books are lying around out there, in Op shops or Trash and Treasure stalls, waiting to be found…and collected.

I found an interesting site with a bibliography of Australian childrens’ literature authors.  When you click on the names of the listed authors and illustrators, images of their work are often displayed, and these are fascinating.  They make me want to read some books like this one by Pixie O’Harris:

Next time I am at my Nan’s I’m going to raid her bookshelf – hopefully she hasn’t thrown away the picture books she used to read to me as a kid.  They will make an excellent start to my collection!

,

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Using Appraisal Resources

Posted by kmcg2375 in english, university on September 8, 2010

In my new role at QUT I am teaching preservice teachers how to use Appraisal resources in the teaching of English.  This is a new theoretical framework for me…is there anyone out there, in Queensland, Australia or otherwise, using the tools of Appraisal as a way into unpacking how texts work?

Here are a few excerpts from the teaching materials I am using:

Resources of Appraisal

  • Attitude (including affect, judgement and appreciation)
    • Affect (registering positive or negative feelings)
    • Judgement (implicit or explicit judgements of the behaviour of people rating it positively or negatively0
    • Appreciation (expressing positive or negative appreciations of the beauty or worth of people, relationships, artefacts, nature etc.)
  • Graduation (gradability; using language to scale the force of meaning up and down)
  • Engagement (using rhetorical devices to adopt a stance toward or commitment to the subject matter)

Questions to probe Appraisal

  • What kinds of feelings or emotions are evident in the text?
  • What judgements are made about human behaviour?
  • What appreciations are made about appearances, relationships, places and things?
  • How is language used to alter meaning; intensify or diminish (force), sharpen or soften (focus)?
  • How are rhetorical techniques being used to position an audience?

(from McGuire, Ray ‘Language matters: Language, Literature and Literacy’ ETAQ Presentation)

It looks like a very exciting framework for drawing together the operational, cultural and critical elements of literacy around the unifying goal of ‘appraising’ the emotional response that a text provokes in an audience.  I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

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Student Choice

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, university on August 9, 2010

An interesting TED talk by Sheena Iyengar on The Art of Choosing:

After talking with some pre-service teachers today about what ‘choice and voice’ means in the classroom, I thought it was very timely to record these points made by Sheena:

It is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone.

In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choicedepends on our ability to perceive differencesbetween the options.

When someone can’t see how one choice is unlike another, or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can beconfusing and frustrating. Instead of making better choices, webecome overwhelmed by choice,sometimes even afraid of it. Choice no longer offers opportunities, but imposes constraints. It’s not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. In other words, choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon thosewho are insufficiently prepared for it.

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Teach. Everywhere.

Posted by kmcg2375 in education, personal, university on July 22, 2010

And so ends my first week of full time University teaching.

Man, how I love teaching.

I mean, I love researching too.  But nothing – nothing – beats the buzz that you get from that act of ‘luring people in’ to a new area of knowledge, getting them excited about it, showing them new ways of thinking.

Anyone who says that teaching isn’t an art form is dead wrong.  This week, teaching again after about 9 months off, I felt like a rusty ballerina!  There were some stumbles, and my fitness is down.  But the dance…it’s addictive.  And the vulnerability you feel when you do it is part of the buzz.

A big shout out to all the staff and students in the School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education at QUT who have helped me feel so welcome 🙂  You rock!

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New job…excited!

Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, university on June 21, 2010

Only ten more sleeps until I begin my new job at Queensland University of Technology!

I’ll be working as a Lecturer in the School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education, which will entail doing some research (not sure what yet, but I have some ideas up my sleeve…) and teaching tutorials for two English Curriculum Studies courses, as well as a general education course in socio-cultural theory.

In honour of my new job, and because I don’t have a web-profile yet, I will share with you my new bio:

Kelli McGraw is a Lecturer in Secondary English Curriculum at the Queensland University of Technology.  She has been an English teacher in South Western Sydney and worked in primary and high schools across NSW to develop students’ skills in debating and public speaking.  Her work with the English Teachers Association and the Australian Association for the Teaching of English has focussed on issues relating to curriculum and assessment, including providing feedback during the development of the Australian Curriculum for English, and she has recently completed her doctoral thesis on the innovations and challenges observed in the implementation of the 1999 HSC English syllabus for NSW.  Kelli’s research interests centre on curriculum change, as well as developing teachers’ capacity to explore multimodality and digital learning tools in the English classroom.

OK, so I haven’t technically “recently completed my doctoral thesis” (only two months to go, hooray!!!) but hey, how soon will I be using the bio?  C’mon…

Wish me luck!

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