Tonight a small group of learners met at a school in Coquitlam for a lesson on how to construct wiimote ir pens. These little homemade devices are amazing. They turn any ordinary whiteboard into a smart board sort of tool. These are all made from common household sorts of part yet this was no common lesson… The learners included three teachers, one sfu faculty associate (me!) and one middle school vice principal…. the teachers, two twelve year old boys. When I walked in the boys were just finishing up their organizing. They were dishing out the components to the work stations, scrambling to find an extra extension cords, getting the soldering irons preheated and downloading some software on to one of the classroom laptops. Then the teachers arrived and we got going. The boys showed us how to plan the wiring, solder the connections, complete the circuit and then use our cell phones to test the connection. They had the software up and running so that we could test out our pens on the screen as we finished. They had to talk us through downloading the softwareon our own away from home, but listening to them, it all seemed amazingly simple. All in all the experience was nothing short of wonderful and I loved that it was them teaching us. If you want to know more about these pens or how to contact these amazing young fellows, let me know. I’m happy to support them in this venture.
Category Archives: My learning
My global ed portfolio overview
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.
Extreme thinking
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?
March learning statement
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.
Learning statements
These are statements that I will make from time to time about my learning. I’m doing this as an exercise specifically related to global ed for now. They will include statements such as I am learning to…; I am learning that….; and I am learning about…. Each learning statement will include some reflection as to why this important to me, how it is happening and how this is transforming my teaching practice, my core values or my self-understanding.
Each statement will also be backed up by evidence to support the statement. I will make a clear connection to the evidence and the particular learning statement or statements so that I am able to justify its inclusion. As I am working with an eportfolio, in some cases the evidence will be a photograph or a description of an artifact. Artifacts might include expamples of student work, videotapes, photographs, artwork, poetry, essays, newspaper clippings, and so on.