Relationships and identities are paramount and dynamic. The Asia literacy approach has been rooted in colonial fear & security discourses and post colonial geopolitical and economic discourses. Current c21 work in Australia e.g. the Melbourne Declaration 2008, The Australian curriculum 2012 and the White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century ignore the historical facts of ongoing change in Australia and Asia based on human connections and understandings. Vijay Mishra has exposed the complexity of this in his work "What was multiculturalism?" which shows the depth of human change in languages, cultures and demographies. Australia exists in a global polity and culture in which 8% of Australians now work elsewhere. This means there is educational need to prepare all students for globalised interpersonal, intrapersonal, intercultural and dynamic interactions. The situation is not polarised East and West but an organic exchange of East MEETS West through human relations. These relationships are fundamental to human understanding so learners for and international context need skills to understand how identities relate, how connectivity means that innovation is transnational and that demographic diasporas are radically reshaping our realities. In this context, it is important to find ways to bring students across the globe together and facilitate opportunities for them to teach each others' languages and cultures. The challenge is to redefine internationalism ion inclusive, equitable ways.
Eeqbal Hassim
Need a new narrative for Asia literacy that goes beyond Asia and into the realm of perspectives, modalities, relationships within and across cultures. So its a matter of perspective:
Developing Asia literacy is going to need to start with telling stories so that people can share what it is to be other and in this to develop skills to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and retain a sense of self. It is not untrammelled cultural relativism. It will involve a an examination of power and status and this includes considerations of race as in the poem from a UNODA poetry competition in 2006.
Race, by an African Kid
When I born, I black
When I grow up, I black
When I go in Sun, I black
When I scared, I black
When I sick, I black
And when I die, I still black
And you white fellow
When you born, you pink
When you grow up, you white
When you go in sun, you red
When you cold, you blue
When you scared, you yellow
When you sick, you green
And when you die, you gray
And you calling me colored ??
In order to build dialogue, learners will need to consciously develop intercultural communication skills, fundamentally through learning languages but also by exploring other cultures through text, artifacts, interactions and immersion so as to avoid the 'fishbowl effect'. This will give learners a capacity to operate in the third space between two cultures and develop competence for diversity. This is a transformative experience the product of which will be understandings, attitudes, skills and behaviours that engender empathy, perspective, reflection, creativity and critical thinking. This is an experiential AND reflective process which is underscored by a moral purpose to learn from each other and with each other in the service of human betterment. Asia literacy is really a form of global literacy. So, I just thought really its about creating identities and then I found this great talk performance by Hetain Patel and Yuyu Rau which makes you think about how we are constantly striving to be authentic in the world:
Malcom Fialho
This section and the workshop I went to on Courageous Conversations about Race dealt with the elephant in the room. Its there, a dominant theme but we avoid it like the plague when in fact we really have to talk about it. The whole idea of white privilege and the attendant issues of power in society resonated with me because of my personal experiences a s kid growing up in post colonial Zambia, learning a range of languages and coming to Australia and my spouse is Indian, an immigrant like me and I have taught Chinese for over thirty years. So identity, race , culture and what's fair have been ever-present. Last night,one of my adult children popped in then caught a cab to the city: she sent me a text about the racist taxi driver who belaboured her with his views about Indians...........pretty unpleasant and he continued when she said she is Indian.
How do we talk about it? there needs to be an acknowledgment that it is there first. Ican see it in my school but many would say it doesn't exist. I can see it all around in truth. Ideas about race revolve around markers like accent, skin colour, cultural distance, networks of influence, degree of racial consciousness and these markers can be found in any organisation. Once behaviours and attitudes are exposed then its a matter to move the people in the organisation through a series of stages beginning fundamentally with the idea Malcolm expressed that "in order to treat me equally, you must recognise my difference." This also means identifying and opposing destructive internalised racism whereby people deny their own identity and seek to demean themselves or escape into the dominant reality by denying themselves (bananas and coconuts, Uncle Toms etc).
It snot a matter of taking away white privilege but rather including all groups in whatever the privilege is- this means the dominant group has to be self-aware and take steps to critically examine its inclusiveness or otherwise. part of this should include culturally safe spaces for other groups to express their sentiments and ideas to inform the critical awareness of race in a school. The process of developing an inclusive environment proceeds on 4 conditions:
Engage- spotlight on race
sustain- tell your stories
deepen- make complexity the friend of inquiry
action through transformation- understand white privilege and make adjustments
The aim is to support all members of the community and to build diversity which can be shown thus:
CIS has tightened up procedures for membership and is providing more focused support in the accreditation process. The eighth edition of the Accreditation Manual has less sstandards but has a much greater emphaisis on the teaching and Learning component and on governance. It is moving away from an audit approach where reams were written about facilities and fire drills to look at the essesnce of an international education across three domains:
Learning programs to enable student growth
School Commitment to local and global ciommunity
Support systems.
The purpose of international schools is to assist learners to become successful global citizens who are comfortable with cultural differences, interact across cultures and move through cultural milieu with a suite of identities. Intercultural understanding underpins the notion of international education
The process for accreditation requires the school to have a clear idea of what international education means in its contexts for its students. A significant development is that Chair and Co-Chairs will receive a Self-Study that has been pre-read at CIS and potential issues for exploration highlighted. This in turn gives greater support to a candidate school for accreditation because it can be alerted to areas that might require deeper clarification or greater evidence.
Tine Kohler. Cultural Skill Building
This workshop outlined a range of techniques and concepts that can be explicitly taught to engender intercultural and intracultural understanding. The idea is to give students an toolkit to expose our conceprions, challeng them, support students to question constructively and to learn from experience so that they are able to reposition themselves with insight. One activity was to write up 5 things about two distinct societies (e.g. China and Australia) , the peoples and the values and then to compare and contrast in a group discussion. Another was to use a leadership roleplay to construct culturally diverse scenarios which were performed and then debriefed. Anothher kind of roleplay was to see how conversations have cultural rules embedded in them. Having a quick look later, there are many resources available and I liked these
The knowledge economy reuqires that education is transformative for the learners and this in turn requires braodening and deepening of teacher quality. Education will need to shift from training and instruction for certainty in life pathways to innovative strategies and structures that help students thrive and inmprove in uncertain and ambiguous global contexts. The world can no longer be delivered in a classroom by teachers deleivering what they learnt. We don't know what will be next but we can speculate.
There is more to education than international and national standards like PISA but there is no doubt that excellence for every learner is fundamental. The capabilities needed by the young are:
metacognitive thinking
intrapersonal knowledge and reflection
interpersonal competence
These need to be nurtured in education systems that allow school autonomy, provide fair funding, have clear standards for teachers and students. In a nutshell schools can only be as good as the people within them so its about developing people with high quality instruction and an ethic of high performance, meaning that every child succeeeds to reach their potential. Schools need to be truly autonomous to do this.
The other thing that that schools are going to need is a a strong sense of moral purpose underlying a strong team and collective capacity to innovate. Professor David Hopkins has much to say about autonomy, improvement, accountability and collective responsibility as elements of moral purpose in education
Follwing on from this then, the whole business of school change is about leadership at every level and for every person. So the leadership capacity of a school has to be identified and attached to shared group values that promote interdependencies not hierarchies. David Logan explores this in his work on tribal leadership:
Adelaide HS will be undergoing a Preparatory visit sometime mid-next year and then we will complete our Self-Study ready for the Accreditation Team Visit in 2015. For me the key points have been that:
the school must have a coherent definition of internationalism across the school and it must be integrated into how the school operationalises the accreditation standards. The intersection of the school organisation and operations with its definition of internationalism is what produces the ethos of the school: it is this ethos, permeating all areas of the school and its culture that creates an international school for its students and community.
the accreditation standards are not a checklist and the explanatory material produced by school committees should pick up intangibles such as culture, interculturality, interpersonalisation and intrapersonalisation. These must be evident to the Visiting Team.
Global citizenship is a cornerstone of the educational Vision and Mission and Objectives (VMO) and should be clearly evident and inherent in the curriculum. In the VMO it is not a "given" but must present as a challenge to drive the innovation and improvement processes in the school. This then gives something for the school to aspire to and gives its members something to aspire to. The VMO must be very clear and the globalist outlook consistently embedded.
Teaching and learning are the core business of the school across three linked areas of values(embedded in VMO), student learning and well being and a collective view of internationalism. The evidence of effectiveness will be developed through the data associated with longitudinal assessment and tracking, along with a process of using data to target improvement for each student AND in the evidence that can be extracted from evaluation of the attainment of graduate qualities.
So, we will need to review our definition and use of internationalism, evaluate the way we collect and use data and examine the intangibles across the school. Staff teams will need to commence this process in learning areas and leadership groups over the next term and into 2014.
Education is about developing the humanity of our learners
I'm not much of a writer and most of what I write is work related I like writing but you seriously have to take time to do it and I don't have alot. Notwithstanding my paucity, I did upload a couple of docs to Scribd and I'm thinking about having a go at the Scravel writing when we go to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in Sept-Oct. http://www.scribd.com/doc/98776324 http://www.scribd.com/doc/98777110
I liked this photobook I found on myebook
and decided to have ago at doing one of my own using photos from a trip to France last year. It's not that hard to do and there are all sorts of bells and whistles to add if you have time. It takes forever for the book to publish but I guess that's because I used images that were high up in the pixellation scale or maybe I'm just talking absolute rubbish but I do know the camera was set on a fairly high level because point and click is about my level of photographic expertise. I digress......the sites I looked at were pretty easy to navigate. One thing that is common to just about everything is Facebook: ubiquitous, omnipresent and exigent. I might have to set up an account.......raises issues for teachers.
Waiting for an invite from strawberry but have created a news paper and embedded it on a new page in this blog. At this stage I'll just have a weekly paper and I can probably stop buying The Australian on saturdays- it is a woeful, prejudiced and opinionated rag! Actually, there was one article I found interesting about collaborative consumerism which reported the work of Rachel Botsman. Its all about how social media is allowing people to share resources like homes, offices, cars rather than just owning everything outright- bit of a new take on our relationship to the means and forces of production. I think I'm going have a look on twitter too.
I did not find TopicMarks comfortable to use and it was frustrating trying tp think of links etc to put in but I did find newsorganiser http://www.newsorganizer.com/ useful and i put its rss feed into wibbitz
Also I came across the peeplo search engine http://au.peeplo.com/ wich searches through blogs and domains too and it has a widget to enable sharing social media.
Kngine proved to be a bit of a dud as they must have moved it from an online thing to a mobile app thing so all I could get was the advert for downloading the app to the iphone which in my case is a work one and I need some code that I don't have because basically these downloads cost heaps apparently. I liked the little video and tweeted it. Anyway, I have never been able to download an app; what's on the phone is what i have. So maybe I need a personal mobile....?
Anyway I continued with my search terms "learning Chinese pedagogy". First I checked out Twurdy and saved to Diigo and also used bit.ly. Through Twurdy, here is an article I found from another search engine, for free articles, www.articlebase.com
.
I wasn't keen on Blekko as it tended to throw up commercial textbooks, software or institutions but I did like this media article:
Found this general article about
growth of Chinese
:
View Chinese as a foreign language and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.
The Dewey Digger and the Wolfram Alpha weren't super helpful for the topic I was focusing on although i did find an interesting article on ERIC through D/digger:
Found this from a Podobook on podcastco from Big Shed audio documentaries. it has nothing to do with Chinese but it caught my attention!
I'm not certain which engines are best: I think it depends on purpose but Twurdy and Blekko are probably better for more specific inquiries unless your looking for journals/articles/books which might be more suited to ERIC and other such archives.
Novitiation: China- Jinan Foreign Language School: Visited Jinan last December and signed a sister school agreement. The school was very hospitable and really happening place with lots of very engaged teachers and students. Next stage is to get an exchange going. Picasa has helped me share some photos.
What riches! A wealth of material but mostly to do with English, Maths, Sciences, Social Sciences. There are incidentally organised materials for languages but a lot is sourced from commercial producers or generated by individuals. I looked at Chinese language material and it was not inspiring but I guess its how you adapt and use it. One thing that would be useful is explanations about how [a] language works e.g. the metalcognition around how to learn it so that students have a resource that say shows them how to structure a sentence. One thing I find really curious in a lot of Chinese didactic video for listening and speaking is the constant emphasis on Chinese script which is actually to do with reading and writing so its not actually helpful- people don't speak in Chinese characters!! I found this little clip quite interesting from a language point of view though the interview style is a bit static but it is not too long:
I also enjoyed this TEd talk on English and the opportunities to flip the lesson:
This also got me thinking about the fact that the resources deal a lot with the English language: it all assumes that English is all there is so this Patricia Ryan talk was pretty interesting, especially when I think about the 58 non-English speaking background International students we have let alone all the other local NESB students and what they bring to education: http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_ryan_ideas_in_all_languages_not_just_english.html
I like the tools that these sites provide for developing ideas and contributing to a community of teachers. In order to do this more it will involve rethinking my work: there is going to be more time in selection and preparation and less emphasis on classwroom delivery. This is where the Flipped Teaching mode is attractive. I think students do benefit from active facilitation through an activity in contrast to active pre-instruction followed by "independent" assignments whether in groups or otherwise. There are big questions here about how teachers work is structured.
Using these various sites seems to solve the copyright problem as the rights for use are clearly specified so that sort of allays my earlier concern. And I think I'm at the end of the space!!
Ok, I started off with looking at Pinterest then got completely distracted and spent quite a while looking for ancient India pictures to pin on a board. That went ok and I repinned someone else's picture and shared one of mine in a tweet.
PREZI and SLIDEROCKET are pretty powerful software and I think I'd use both of them. I found sliderocket more straightforward and easier to manipulate but I was a bit frustrated in not being able to work out how to change layout and fonts for the whole slides. Prezi provided a lot of options for movement and pathways and I found it a bit tricky to set it up. You have to think in 3d while looking at a 2d screen. I would also encourage my students to use these for presenting their own work and collaborating with others. My year 8s have just started a film study and I think these tools will motivate them-------more fun than just writing a straight text.
Rather than starting from scratch, I imported some old presentations and fiddled around with them a bit. I did import an image and youtube into Sliderocket....hope this doesn't breach copyright, which seems pretty complex these days.
Well.........I had some trouble getting beond the first page but eventually managed to save a website into the library- not quite sure how. After thsi i quite enjoyed fiddling around and creating a list and a group. There is an amazing amount of stuff you can look for and tap into if you want. I even tweeted something i liked. I would like to spend a bit more time with this but it might have to wait till next week when things at work settle down. Social media, web 2.0 are fun and there are so many connections but our work lives are so linear at school and so are our work environments: they are more like the C19 the C21. What we need is time and this would mean that the nature of ou.r work would have to be reconceptualised outside the current formula of x.teachers: y.students @ z.contact time. Yes yes I know that the budget controls all but these are just choices. teachers need time and space to really engage new technologies and embed them in practice. I guess incremental change is best: one thing at a time.
Hmmm...not sure if I'm keen on this yet but let's see what happens over the week. I have picked a range of things/people to follow and tried a few tweets including links using bit.ly.
Its a diffferent idea, just launching what you think into the internet or responding to people you don't know and I'm not quite comfortable with it: mostly i just ring/email or talk to people I know about what i think. I found the idea of tracking and analyzing tweets and bit.ly links as a sort of adjunct to marketing yourself quite remarkable and I can see its usefulness to public figures and companies to gauge penetration and response. Next thing, we'll find that its going to be part of performance appraisal!!
I am waiting for Pinterest to send me the link to register and I'll try to have a play with that.
I have added another gadget and I find that I lack finesse in editing the layout to get things to fit neatly so practice is needed.
Google news was pretty straight forward and I liked being able to adjust sources of content. Google reader irked me a abit because when yopu search you get a lot of stuff you don't want i.e. blogs that actually don't have much to do with what you are after but have one word e.g. 'Byzantine' meant ended up with heaps of uninteresting stuff but I did learn how to unsubscribe as a result!! I created an iGoogle page and added some content such as humour, news and weather. I have started to organise my documents into Google docs and have shared a couple of docs as a test of how it happens. Next week. I'll have a go at adding a picasa or flickr gadget. I couldnt set up a flickr account with the google sign in and i seem to remember a picasa account somewhere but the sign in details are probably history. Its anmazing how the time passes. I got going at about 8am and now its nearly 11! Its personally stimulating but I can wonder if using some gadgets at school will be blocked by the Education Department e.g can't access youtube online.
Tried the Google What Do You Love search for British Archaeology and came up with 21 different things! What I love is that there's just so much, I can get it and I am not waiting for something to come on ABC or SBS tv.
