Betty Online

So I am clearly the lucky one. I get to read all of the Global Ed baseline portfolios. For the most part, I’m blown away. I feel honored by what the students are sharing with me; delighted with the glimpses into each of their own ways of knowing and sense making. I feel privileged to be the one who gets to do this. But I also feel sad. I feel sad because I know that from what several of the students have said, that they are feeling connected and a growing sense of community. They are enjoying what they are building together and so my sadness is about that while I am the one that gets to collect in these samples of learning and special “aha moments” because I’m the teacher, it isn’t my intention to put myself at the center. Instead I would rather be finding ways to create or enhance a web and a network. The question is, how? How can I meet the requirements of assessment, keep myself in but not central to the emerging web, and help to support and foster the community that is developing through these or future portfolios?

I loved the opportunity last night to sit and listen to the students in the global ed group share the highlights from their portfolios. As an instructor, it was amazing. 17 students presented and each one pulled their thinking together in such a different way. Some brought binders with stickies or little notes scattered throughout to remind them of the significance of one piece or another. A few brought outlines of the significant pieces. One brought a chart. Others talked more off the top of their head with a learning statement or two to refer to. One sifted through a keynote presentation she wasn’t yet ready to share as a whole. While the variety of ways of presenting their thinking was diverse, as was the significant learning, there were some striking similarities to the patterns of what stood out. For all or most of the student there was some kind reference to a kind of paradigm shift, some kind of understanding of a different way of looking at what global education meant. Not everyone agreed on what that meaning was, but for many there was some kind of personal implication, some shift in how they felt they needed to approach things not only in their teaching but also in their personal life. Many talked about a different kind of understanding of themselves in the world.  I found these similar threads both interesting to note and exciting to listen to.

I guess if I’m asking my students to submit portfolio summaries I should consider doing the same thing. I know I’ve learned a lot from this class and I believe that it is so important to stop periodically and summarize one’s learning, or at least highlights.  Those become markers and actually help to solidify the learning, becoming concept maps if you will of what it is that we know, or think we know. So here’s my first go at this:

Through the global ed class, readings and discussion I am learning

•  to think about things as systems.  I’m trying to catch myself breaking anything into parts.  I know that I do that to manage and understand all kind of thing and I’m wondering what it would look like and how it would be different to not do that. I’m trying to look for connections between ideas, between concepts. This fits very much with the kind of research I’m trying to do, where I’m looking for patterns and generalizations.  Perhaps the shift to qualitative research is a beginning of acceptance of being less mechanistic.
• to really embrace knowledge as culturally constructed.  This isn’t new to me but framed differently now as I put it more into the perspective of system thinking. Understanding, for example, how much science has influenced not only science and how we approach investigation, but also how much mechanistic thinking has shaped so much of everything else in our western culture.  I’m considering time differently, language differently, religion or spirituality differently, even family systems differently. I love the consideration this adds to thinking about schools and curriculum.  Always I’ve been somewhat radical in my resistance to breaking school so much into subjects, concepts, test results, strategies and policies.  Now I’m beginning to understand why this has happened and am even more inclined to want to teach holistically, but with more theory behind me.
• to be able to be more optimistic about strategies for change. For this I loved the idea of the metaphor of the fractal. I loved grounding the think global, act local strategy in this metaphor; seeing the connection to chaos theory and to physics.  I loved having my mind opened up to the possibilities that this allows for. I felt as though this was the most optimistic and uplifting part of what we’ve looked at.

This class has led me off on to paths I didn’t expect to take.  I’m left with a pile of readings and even more curiosity than I started with… and lack of curiosity has never been a problem for me.  I want to explore more on the spiritual side.  My beginning investigations down that road have led me into the whole aboriginal world.  I feel like my journey is truly just beginning.

I’ve just returned from a most amazing conference put on by the BC Federation of Labour and the BCTF. What was amazing was the collection of people, who are all so dedicated and informed, and some of the presenters. If only some of what they all know collectively could rub off on all of us.

Stephen Lewis spoke on Friday evening. It was the second time I’ve heard him speak but he was definitely equally as powerful. What was noticeably different was his tone because of the audience he was speaking too. He was clearly within his comfort zone. He knew he was speaking to an audience that respects him and agrees with him. In some ways for me this made his speech all the more passionate.

Two things really stood out for me this time from what he was saying. The first was a shift for me in how I see my own country. While I think I have grown up in Canada believing that I could be proud to be Canadian, it seems that we are losing that right. In the past decade we have lost ground in being a country at the forefront of working towards peace, social justice and sustainability. In fact our own Canadian Human Rights Commissioner, Louise Arbour, is stepping down perhaps because of our hypocrisy as a nation. We have scarred our record. Most recently we helped to prevent the passage of the UN convention on rights of indigenous peoples. We have undermined the Kyoto accord and are continuing to do so. This past week Canada refused to allow water to be inscribed as a human right. If I want to continue to be proud to be Canadian I need to be involved in politics. There is just no getting away from it. Marian Dodds quoted Rosemary Brown, “when I hear someone say they are not interested in politics, I know I am talking to a fool.” I certainly understand the truth in that now.

The second thing that stood out for me from Stephen Lewis’ talk was a re-emphasis of what I heard loud and clear the last time I heard him speak. As he says, “the never agains are endless,” yet we keep letting them happen. The G8 countries (Canada included) have failed to live up to the millenium goals for 2015 in three areas. We are no closer to achieving a goal of spending just 0.7% of our GNP to alleviate poverty. In fact poverty is getting worse. More than 1 billion people in our world live on less than $1/day. More than 3 billion on less than $750/year. And to that now we add the food crisis. Eygpt, Thailand, Yehman and Mexico are no longer getting enough food. As SL pointed out, these are not poor countries but middle income countries! Secondly, we have not reduced infant mortality. Over 10,000,000 children under age five die from preventable diseases each year. Thirdly, we have not made the significant gains that were set out with regards to women’s rights. He talked as one example of the worsening situation for women in the Congo. The UN has in its charter the responsibility to protect. This means that in the case where a country will not protect its citizens from violence the UN will intervene. While we have the responsibility to protect, this clause is not used. It is not used, for example again, in the Congo or in much of Africa because the violence is often only against women! His point, quite simply put, awareness is not enough.

Other powerful speakers presented throughout the two day conference. Gillian Creese, a UBC anthropology professor spoke on the topic of economic security as a human right. She used current statistics in BC and the lower mainland to make the point that our BC is violating human rights. Grand chief Ed John who spoke again of Canada’s lack of support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He provided details about the current situation in BC. (more on him and his impact on me in a separate blog post still to come). Dr. Emmanuel Rozental, a medical surgeon from Columbia, presented a most passionate talk on Canada’s role in the corporation take over. Dr. Rozental is heavily involved with the Columbia Workers’ Rights groups. He touched on free trade, multi national corporations, and indigenous rights. He moved the entire audience to tears. I won’t do him justice at all to paraphrase his words here, but I want to at least make note of a few and then follow up in a separate blog post that I am still working on about my growing respect, understanding and curiousity about our relationship to first nations rights in Canada. So a few of the more powerful quotes from Dr. Rozental:

“When we look at the past and it was bad, and we look at today and it is worse, and we look to the future and we know it will be even worse, then we cannot reconcile the past and say we are sorry.”

“Canada has been hijacked by a few transnational companies.” and “On cannot change what one does not understand. We need to understand the global nature of capital.” “Harper says that we cannot sacrifice the economy for the ecology.” “They (the capitalists) have a memory to act from. We don’t. …. We cannot continue to base our action only on resistance….In the process of resisting we must plan our own position.” He claims that the capitalist governments rely on three strategies: propaganda, legal policy (free trade agreements and structural reform) and terror. In Columbia over 4 million people have been murdered and displaced. He would like to see us stop free trade between Canada and Columbia. Stop the SPP agreeement and act on mining to protect the health and health care of his people. To end, “words without action are meaningless. Action without words are blind. Action and words outside of the spirit of community are death.”

Next I went to hear a young and very intelligent woman, Dawn Paley, present on mining. By now, as those of you who know me well, will understand, my mind was working overtime. Dawn is an independent researcher who should definitely be supported. She filled us in a little on the acitivities of a company called Gold Corp, which is the 2nd biggest gold mining company in the world. Our teacher and CPP pension money, by the way, supports Gold Corp and by the end of Dawn’s presentation I was more than a little uncomfortable with that knowledge. The environmental damage, the lack of respect for the health and well being of whole communities, and the general lack of ethic care involved in mining in Latin America and even here in Canada is truly appalling. But not to worry though. The only condition for money held in CPP is profitability and believe me, Gold Corp, even with its lack of accountability to its share holders, thanks to some creative off shore money management strategies such as chains of companies held in the Cayman Islands, appears to be an excellent investment for our money. We will have a solid pension if our lack of environmental protection laws internationally are allowed to continue unchecked! (Oh and by the way, Canada’ lack of support at the UN for indigenous peoples rights and the basic human right to water started to be more clear to me in this session.)

To round off the day I went to hear Murray Dobbin speak on Privatization and Human Rights. We was talking specifically about the notion of public private partnerships (P3). More on this to follow.

Yesterday one of the students in the class presented her curriculum rewrite assignment. She has chosen to rethink how she is teaching the extreme environment unit in her intermediate science class. I woke up this morning quite excited about what she presented because she hadn’t simply changed the activities or even gone into more depth. She had actually decided that she had some very fundamental problems with why she is being asked to teach the unit at all. After reading the texts and the teachers guide for the unit and then considering the BC curriculum learning outcomes, all based on American material with a Canadian twist, she felt strongly that the underlying message is that we need to conquer these extreme environments so as to lucratively exploit the resources. Fascinating stuff.

So the question came up as to how frank about her bias she might choose to be. Does she present her position to the students and “color” their thinking on it? Or, does she keep quiet about her own views, present the unit believing that through their own exploration of the extreme environment material particularly in light of other work that the students have done on bias and such, the students will draw their own conclusions and eventually, or not, recognize the underlying issues? I love the dilemma itself. I love too that in this example it is so clear to her but it makes me wonder how much as teachers we really question why we are teaching what we teach.

For me personally I can relate this to my own struggle with my own thinking about computer/technology teaching. On one hand it is motivating for students and an excellent tool. Computers provide ways of connecting and sharing resources such that we’ve never seen before. On the other, where are we going with technology? What about the sell, sell, sell aspect; the constant need to grow and improve; the role of huge megacorporations in manufacturing and storing, buying and selling information; the exploitation and pollution internationally because of computer manufacture and disposal? There are so many questions, perhaps the least of which are we blindly buying in to the teaching of technology because it is fun, cutting edge and a new “cool” in motivating students? How are we doing with teaching the technology bias from both sides?

I am learning about the theories behind global education. I love that I’m starting to understand the difference between system thinking and mechanistic thinking, even to the point where I question the need for such a dichotomy. I’m understanding the notion of complexity so that I’m feeling great delight in the metaphor of fractals. I find myself thinking about how lessons on fractals can be integrated into teaching at the primary and intermediate level so that I’m thinking about when I can next volunteer to go in to my neighborhood school and try some of this out. What fun! I’m finding myself writing more and more about the theories, so far in yet unpublished blogs, but they are coming. Check back here for more in the near future.

I love the idea of shifting our thinking away from being strictly linear because the idea of embracing the complexity of fractals is a much more optimistic way of understanding the possibility of solutions to the complex and seemingly huge global problems we are currently facing. It not only suggests that the complexity of the problems can be broken down into similar but smaller, manageable problems, but that each of our own small steps to create solutions can in fact become part of the greater whole. To me this notion is quite uplifting.

As I prefer writing on a computer I will use this blog space for my reflective journal as I work through the TL4GP program. An interesting notion from class last week is that if it is global it will tie into everything and so my challenge is to use this space to jot my thoughts (some private, some public) for what I read and think about and then see if I can make that true.  So for example, can I connect the technology teaching and learning that I do to my global ed work.  That would be my ideal.