Relaxed and grounded in a state of being uncomfortable

        As I near the end of a summer filled with thoughts of overarching themes in the education system, as I ‘cook’ my thoughts and my learning from the culmination of my graduate coursework, and as I continue to read and engage online with virtual colleagues who constantly motivate and inspire me, I noticed a shift in my mental mindset this week as I planned and prepared for the start of the school year.
        At times I feel relaxed. Maybe it’s because I’m teaching the same grade for the 2nd year in a row. That’s a favourite because I’m finished with the hectic pace of teaching something for the first time (I’ve been a first year teacher five years of my fifteen year career) but while the situation is familiar, it’s also relatively new because it’s only the second year so the inherent excitement of novelty is still attached.
        Other times I feel very grounded. I do feel a certain, new confidence in myself as an educator. The Masters degree allowed me to find a solid theoretical and methodological basis for not only who I am as an educator, but also why I teach the way I do. I am more sure of what’s important to me and my ever-evolving pedagogy. I feel my ‘peeps’ with me, bolstering, offering support, adding to my life’s work.
        And then, at times, I feel unsettled, uncomfortable. As I plan, I notice that I am engaging in the planning process in an entirely new way. After fifteen years of teaching, I’m doing things radically different;  if that’s not transformative learning then I don’t know what is.
        What’s different? I’m faster. I’m able to use social media to ask experts questions and get almost immediate answers. I’m able to find excellent, relevant resources quickly. I know myself better so I’m able to sift through and discard the irrelevant with much more certainty.
        But it’s more than that. I think in a different way. I have a heightened awareness of the different layers of thinking in everything I do whether I’m talking with a colleague or planning a math unit. I have a clearer sense of what I think to be important and I am aware that the kids needs are much more in my mind as I go.
        It’s exciting and a little unsettling at the same time. I am excited about the start of the year. I can’t wait to see the students next week. I know my passion to work with children and help them along in life is an strong as ever. The tricky part is, as I wrote in an earlier post, that after my MEd learning I need to learn how to walk differently as I move through my classroom, my school, my home, my community. That’s the part I’m still adjusting to. And it’s uncomfortable. But that’s okay. That uncomfortable feeling only means I’m still learning and that is a state of being uncomfortable that I’m pretty sure I can handle.

Imagery: iEllen by boeke from Flickr.com

Learning to walk as a master

Last month I completed my Masters in Education in Educational Practice from Simon Fraser  University. This was a graduate field program, meaning that it was designed for working  teachers to complete while continuing to work full time. It involved teacher inquiry into our  practice using qualitative research methods. It was easily the most transformative learning  experience of my life and I feel as if I’m walking through the world differently these days.

What did I learn? I’ve been cooking my thoughts, as Dr. Kelly, our prof, would say, to try to  make sense of the year’s learning. It took me ten days to relax and come down from the  intensity of the thesis submission and final comprehensive presentation. Once I relaxed, I  realized how exhausted I am, both physically and mentally. Aside from the sleep deprivation,  which I can remedy by returning to a normal bedtime, it’s a good exhaustion. It’s similiar to the wonderful feeling I enjoy after a long run when my body feels physically worked and tired, but the better for it. And what was it, exactly, that exhausted my mind? What’s actually still cooking in my thoughts?

I have moments of insight. Moments where there is pure clarity as to what I learned and how the MEd experience changed me. And then there are days of feeling lost and scattered and confused about how to synthesize and articulate even one piece of my learning. Is it even possible to communicate one entire year of intense study? Some days I think I need to just wait and, with time, clarity will arrive. Other days I think that to condense all that learning into so few words is impossible and unrealistic and will never happen, regardless of how much time passes.

I decided on a few profound learnings that I can, with certainty, share at this point:

1. I learned to attend, to be wide awake (see Maxine Greene). Not what I expected at all. I expected to learn ‘something’, not a way of being in the world. I hope to share this with others.

2. I learned that, in my humble opinion, to be literate in Canada today, to be literate in the world today, must include the ability to read and communicate with, and through, images. It’s not enough anymore to simply see literacy as reading and writing; overall literacy must include visuals as one of the forms of communication. I finally achieved an understanding of what this ‘visual literacy’ means and learned the beginnings of how to include it into my practice. See works by Elliot Eisner and David Jakes.

3. I learned that my own notion of citizenship has a local, national, global and digital component. Creating global citizens is a popular topic in education these days, especially in the blogosphere, but to me, that’s only one piece. It’s not sensible to have empathy for those in dire situations on the other side of the planet and yet turn a blind eye on those in dire need in your own community. And the complicated beast that became (digital) citizenship in my thesis is a topic I have yet to tame, although I enjoy the constant and challenging attempt to do so and I now, more than ever before, absolutely see this as a vital component to everyone’s education, not just, but especially, children’s.

4. I learned that deep caring for children, all children, sits as the base of my pedagogy. It always has, but I wasn’t aware of how and why until I wrote my thesis. Motherhood is a part of the deep caring, but not all of it. I care deeply for the well-being, the happiness and the future of all children, mine first, of course, but all other’s children a close second. The theme of care, always present before, but now with the added weight of notions like making decisions based on the 7th generation to come and scholars such as Nel Noddings to bolster and add support, is even more prevalent in who I am as an educator.

5. Finally, thankfully, I learned that I found a place of contentment. This is, of course, more of a mental state than a physical place. I often struggle to be content in life. I have high expectations for myself and those around me. I detest boredom and usually create a constant, positive push to improve and move forward in my life. With the ending of the Masters year, however, I realized I need to stop pushing for awhile and just be. And, thankfully, I’m content with that.

And so, all this learning has left quite an impact on me personally and professionally. I will walk through the world in a different way, truly transformed by the learning experiences of this past year. I know that next month, I will walk into my school and my classroom differently. I’ll walk into that classroom determined to advocate for the arts, an approach, a method that children love and that is important for their education. I’ll walk into that classroom knowing that the reality of shared experience extends beyond the classrooms walls and into an intangible environment entered into through technology and that extension is changing, has already changed how we learn, engage with one another, and live our lives. I’ll walk into that classroom sensitive not only to the influence that my family’s complicated heritage has offered, now offers, to my practice, but also keenly aware that each of my students also bring known and unknown family history to their learning and our classroom environment. Finally, I know that I will walk differently as a mother with a new perspective on how to raise my children.

More to come…

 

Imagery: Waking creativity by jenn.davis and Jurassic Park by mallitch, both from Flickr.com and used under Creative Commons licensing.

 

Settling in to Present One Year of Learning in 20 Minutes


I’m thinking about presenting. Still deep in Masters mindset, I’m looking ahead to my last task – the comprehensive ‘exam’, which, it turns out, isn’t a traditional ‘exam’ at all.

The comprehensive exam is a demonstration of learning. To quote the course outline, it is ‘a presentation of significant understandings about education…and a demonstration of your systematic, critical, creative, and reasoned thinking about your inquiry as applied to your own inquiry and educational practice’. We have 20 minutes to present one year of learning, followed by 20 minutes of questions from our profs and a student reader, then 20 minutes of open questioning from anyone in the room.

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To prepare, I’m re-reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. I’m going through his blog too. I’m not even halfway through the book, but I already have a list of things I want to include in my presentation:

  1. Acknowledgements Collage – I’d like to do a digital photo collage of all those who helped me with the coursework in the last year. If I can’t find photos of everyone, I was thinking a Wordle of everyone’s names would also have a nice visual impact.
  2. Story – Reynolds refers to Daniel Pink’s six senses from A Whole New Mind, one of which is story. In An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, Kieran Egan writes about the power of story too. From reading Pink and Egan, I have, in the past, integrated story telling into lessons and I’d love to try it in this upcoming presentation. Story is an efficient way to condense large amounts of material. More importantly, it’s a much more human way to connect with an audience; everyone loves a good story.
  3. Visuals – Anyone who knows me will know to expect photographs and a other visual representations of information. One of my three strands of research is visual literacy and arts based methods and my over-arching metaphor is that of the photographer; visuals are deeply ingrained in who I am personally and professionally. And, again, visuals are an efficient way to communicate a vast amount of information in a singular way. In particular, I want to create my own series of ‘through the lens’ altered photographs inspired by these photos here.
  4. Simplicity – I love the quote at the start of the book – “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Leonardo da Vinci. Reynolds talk about the importance of “deciding what matters and letting go of the rest” (p. 17). I often try to pack in too many words, too much information, and this time I want to emphasize the essence of my research and let all the rest go. If anyone wants to read my thesis or talk to me about all the other amazing things I learned, they are welcome to, but for the presentation I’d like to focus in on what really matters.
  5. Emotion – I want to connect with the people in the room at an emotional level. I want to invite them, draw them in, so that they experience a little piece of my learning and want to know more. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that yet, as there will be at least 20 others in the room, each with their own beliefs, assumptions, and lenses. I know it will be challenging to evoke an emotional response from every person, but I’m going to try.
  6. Enthusiasm – This one won’t be a problem. I could talk, very excitedly, about my Masters research for hours, days, weeks! I know the power of positive energy and I will be sure to bring that to the presentation. I’m going to need it, too. I have the last time slot of the day!

Despite my efforts to do no Masters work for a week (I submitted my thesis a few days ago and had vowed to take a break), I can’t stop thinking about the upcoming comps presentation. I’m still mentally exhausted from writing the thesis, but there’s a nice settling of information in my head. I guess I’m settling in to present one year’s worth of profound learning in only twenty minutes.

Fortunately, it feels like the presentation is already starting to take shape, and I think it’s going to settle into my mind almost entirely on it’s own.

Image “Twenty Minutes” by me.

(Digital) Citizenship

Less than two weeks ago, I was excited that eight months of teacher research was solidifying into the central idea of learning relationships. While I originally focused my MEd on student/teacher rapport through a video camera, there is much more going on in the Elementary Connected Classrooms to focus simply on the teacher/student relationship. There are peer-to-peer relationships, the collaborative relationships between the three teachers involved, and then all the crossovers between the almost 70 students and 3 teachers interacting in different ways (not just through the camera) each week. I decided that the term ‘learning relationships’ better described the complicated web of interpersonal connections in our unique setting and changed my terminology to reflect that deeper understanding.

I was, however, only temporarily satisfied with ‘learning relationships’ as the hub of my research. It just seemed too simple and not quite right. Now, after further reflections on my experiences at the Digital Learning Spring Conference and another weekend at SFU with a brilliant professor, I finally think (I hope!) I’ve found the main themes that connect all other ideas at the center of my learning.

At this point, deep caring for children – all children – sits as the base of my pedagogy. It always has. Motherhood is a part of that, but not all of it. I care deeply for the well-being and the happiness and the future of all children, mine first, of course, but other’s children are a close second. I love working with kids and absolutely fight for the best education they can possibly get because, in my opinion, not offering what they deserve in the classroom every day is a disservice to them.
digital citizenship

In my opinion, if we, as educators, truly care about children, we need to honour the learning environment that today’s children are growing up in. If we are guiding them to become good citizens, we need to incorporate digital citizenship into their learning. Each child, family, and community will vary as to the extent to which new technologies have become a part of daily life, hence the idea of honoring each individual’s learning environment. Thanks to some simple online dialogue with David Truss, I’ve decided that (digital) citizenship is the other main theme that binds all my research strands. Citizenship is still the main idea, but with the lesser theme of digital connected to it.

A vital component of (digital) citizenship is how to create and maintain healthy learning relationships. I worry about those, for example, who don’t understand social media because it is the way of the world in a very real sense. We need more educators to become experts in how to use new technologies, if for no other reason than to be good role models and guide the kids; the kids who will use those technologies anyway, regardless of whether or not they’ve received guidance to help keep them productive and safe. Even more important, we need educators who don’t get caught up in the technology, but who become (digital) citizens themselves and then gain a greater understanding of the larger, more meaningful themes, such as learning relationships, within that new technologically-rich context.

Imagery by I am I.A.M. from Flickr.com and altered as allowed per CC license using FotoFlexer’s SuperPixelate.

Conference + Social Media = Powerful Learning Experience

I experienced the most powerful professional development of my life this past week at the Digital Learning Spring Conference in Vancouver. I attended as a co-presenter, along with my Elementary Connected Classroom (ECC) colleagues. The three of us gave a 45 minute presentation sharing our work in the ECCThe view from my balcony project, and while that was a powerful learning experience in itself, it was only one tiny piece of my overall experience.

The keynotes, Dr. Alec Couros and George Couros, were fantastic. These guys understand what education is all about. They know that the students come first and their passion as educators is inspiring. The keynote was one of the best I’ve seen, mixing insight and wisdom with humor and sibling rivalry. Their keynote, another piece of my learning, is here and well worth looking at.

Usually, good keynotes, being a presenter and other workshops would be enough to make for an intense pro-d experience. And they did, most definitely. But, the thing that transformed a regular conference experience into a powerful learning experience was social media itself.

Before the conference, I sent out a few tweets to people I wanted to meet face to face. I’ve been building a digital identity for five years now with blogging, Flickr, Slideshare, Twitter and more, and I’ve carefully selected certain educators to learn from and with online. The conference was my first chance to connect with some of these people, and it absolutely transformed the conference experience. I met some amazing people and enjoyed wonderful conversations. Some of those conversations were backchannel tweets during workshops, some were face to face over lunch or later at night, and some were just plain silly (at one point I felt like the girl sitting in the back of the classroom laughing with the troublemakers, just like high school all over again).

The lasting impression is that without careful, purposeful use of social media to build relationships with like-minded educators, none of those connections would have happened. I would have attended the conference, been inspired, and gone home like I have dozens of times before.

Instead, I went, I presented, I was inspired, I socialized and I left with new friends and acquaintances. I left feeling connected to some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. I left with the feeling that I’d found a few more of my ‘peeps’, as Dr. Kelly (from my MEd) calls those who you can really learn with and from in life. I left feeling empowered by deep, meaningful learning connections that will continue after, rather than end with, the final keynote. It was the most powerful learning experience I’ve ever had and it would never have happened without social media.

Preparing to ‘Stop’

Driving home from a weekend of graduate coursework last  Sunday,  I approached signs warning of road work ahead. There, at the side of the road, was this sign:

preparetostop

Those three simple words summarized the first weekend of Educ 807 and, I’m guessing, the next few months of graduate coursework.  We discussed the importance of being aware enough to notice the ‘stops’ during the inquiry process, those moments when reading, or writing, or engaging in the inquiry process, that, although fleeting, offer rich and meaningful learning. More on ‘stops’ and the originator of the idea follows.

In my mind, there are a few steps to take before you are prepared to ‘stop’. It’s good to know these steps; if you don’t slow down and aren’t prepared to stop, you could miss your destination entirely, and I know that no one in the cohort wants to do that. So, my steps, as I see the process…

Preparing to Stop:

  • Know who you are personally and professionally. Understand the  lenses through which you view the world, know your distant teachers and how they’ve influenced you, and be aware of your passions and what ‘rubs’ you the wrong way.
  • When reading, read for what David Appelbaum calls ‘stops’, those gaps or spaces in-between ideas that catch your attention. Instead of reading an article and underlining everything that you find interesting, read with an awareness of what ‘stops’ you and makes you think. Find those few ideas that inform your inquiry and make you wonder. Read in a critical yet personally meaningful way. Not everything that is interesting is relevant to your inquiry.
  • When you notice a ‘stop’, determine why you stopped – why did it matter? How does that inform you, your teaching practice, the inquiry you’re working on?
  • Also note, what questions does the stop raise?
  • Finally, when writing, pay attention to the self-created ‘stops’ that emerge from reflection, observation, data collection, etc. – I’m guessing we’ll be learning more about this in the coming weeks as we’re onto data collection very soon!

If only road signs could always sum up learning experiences for people. The world would be a completely different place…

MEd Layers in a Dream

I had a dream last night…vivid, involved, realistic. The first thing I remembered from the dream was that I was very self-aware and I was thinking. The time was a few days in the future, the upcoming weekend to be exact, and I was down at the coast for my Masters coursework. I was not at SFU (where I actually do go for my studies), but in a house. I had my binder of articles, my notes, my bag, even my lunch. Everyone in the cohort, including the professor, Dr. Kelly, was there. It was a usual weekend of study…except for the house.

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The house that we were in was old and cozy. The rooms were large and opened one onto another. There was a large living room full of seating. I had a spot on one of the couches because, as in real life, I’d been one of the first to arrive for class that day. Even the couch I was sitting on was in the exact same place I usually sit in the room at SFU – I like to situate myself along the back wall facing the prof at the bottom of the ‘U’ shaped table arrangement.

The dream progressed through a normal day of Masters study. I sat on the couch, with my binder in my lap, discussing articles with the group and the people sitting near me. We broke for lunch and I wandered outside with others to sit and eat on the large patio at the rear of the house. The afternoon involved a creative, arts-based activity in the kitchen involving melting wax (haven’t figured  that one out yet) and I distinctly recall admiring beautiful owl sculptures that decorated a few of the rooms in the house.1336922714_4606f83fc6

I’ve been peeling away the layers of this dream all day and, as I’m obsessed with it for the day, it’s my musing for the week.

The first layer of interest was that I dreamed about the Masters in the first place. With the life-consuming report card deadline fast approaching, I’ve had little time to devote to MEd studies in the last week. Out of necessity, I’ve had to spend that extra time on assessment and evaluation tasks. I wondered at first if dreaming about the MEd was an indication that my mind needed to spend more time on my studies.

The second layer, too much for my half-awake brain to immediately sort out, was the house. Why the house? Why was it so vivid and so central in my dream? Once I started to wake up, I realized that the house in my dreams was symbolic of Prospect School (now called Prospect Center) from an assigned reading I finished a few days ago.

The reading is from a book entitled “From Another Angle: Children’s Strengths and School Standards: The Prospect Center’s Descriptive Review of the Child” which tells about an amazing school in Bennington, Vermont. The original Prospect School opened in 1965.  The teachers at Prospect created their own philosophy of education which included an emphasis on process and inquiry. Also, these educators were, in my mind, dedicated teacher researchers. They designed comprehensive descriptive processes through which to study not only the students and their learning, but also the educational practices taking place within the school.

When I finished the reading I was inspired and impressed by the educational environment that was Prospect School (the school closed in the early 1990s). I hadn’t had a chance to do any writing, or even thinking, on the reading. I think that my mind wasn’t ready to let go of the ideas in the reading, and a detailed, wonderful dream in which I was actually experiencing a meshed SFU/Prospect School was the result.

As I seem to rethink and question everything these days, I started thinking about the dream itself. Why was I even spending the time to make the connections above? It was, after all, only a dream…or was it…

That’s when I came to the last layer. The last layer resonates at a much deeper level and deserves explanation.

In order to better situate myself as a teacher researcher and more fully understand the paradigmatic assumptions through which I view and act within the world, I started to research those who currently influence, and have influenced, my thinking. One of the greatest influences in shaping who I am today was my great-grandmother, or, as we called her, Nanny.

62125068_3340ca4409Nanny’s mother was Metis and her maternal grandmother was Cree. She exemplified the combination of old wives’ tales from her Scottish fur trader father and the common sense based on living in connection with the natural world which, I’m guessing, she received from her Metis and Cree maternal roots. I speculate not only because Nanny passed away peacefully years ago (at the fine age of exactly 99 1/2 years old), but also because my family knows precious little of Nanny’s Metis origins. She was sent away, along with the other three eldest siblings in the family, to ‘boarding school’ (a.k.a. residential school) and never spoke of her aboriginal ties. What we do know about our large Metis family in northern and central Manitoba we have learned since Nanny’s passing. In order to learn more about myself as a teacher researcher, I felt the need to learn about First Nations epistemologies and worldviews, especially those of the Metis and the Cree.

One of the more compelling articles I have read so far is a personal narrative by Patricia Steinhauer entitled “Situating myself in research“.  The author wrote the article during her Masters coursework and discusses her ‘rubs’ connected to low achievement among students in the reserve system. She returned to graduate coursework with hopes of finding some solutions to these issues and, in particular, mentions a course in Indigenous research methods.

As an aside, I’ve been trying to find the answer to a seemingly simple question – what was ‘research’ called before the birth of the word ‘research’ in the 16th century? – since reading Denzin and Lincoln‘s introduction to The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, so the Steinhauer reading definitely caught my interest.

Steinhauer tells about the tasks assigned as part of the Indigenous research methods course:

Here we had several tasks. The first required each of us to select a living object somewhere on campus and to spend an hour with it. The second task was to spend half an hour each evening watching the moon. The final task was to make notes of our dreams.

Herein lies the final layer of my musing. My mother used to, and taught me to as well, record my dreams upon waking. Dreams were important to Nanny, too, and it was commonly believed that she would dream things before they happened. She rarely spoke of such things, but there are enough family stories to make a believer of almost anyone. Although I have no actual evidence, I think that the importance of dreams as a way of making sense of the world was a part of Nanny’s Metis and Cree heritage. ‘Boarding school’ couldn’t erase her worldview, it could only erase her acknowledgment of it.

As a result of my hidden Metis and Cree influences, I believe that dream analysis is a deeply ingrained part of my overall worldview. It’s part of how I make sense of the world, and, in this case, helps me to fully process readings for my Masters degree. I feel comfortable, and somewhat validated, with this new knowledge and thankful that the Masters coursework has helped me to understand this layer hidden for so long inside the core of who I am.

Imagery from Flickr: the swansea door by Grant MacDonald, the Great Horned Owl by Henry McLin, and Apaches in Italy?!? II by maxgiani.

The MEd dictionary, 1st edition

This is a list of random, assorted words from my Masters studies that catch my interest enough to jot them down or circle them where I find them. The act of recording them, along with my own and others’ definitions (thank you Wordsmyth), should help me to stay specific and keep my thoughts clear and my writing precise.

Cycle: Defined as ‘a circle of events that repeats in a regular pattern’. Goes with spiral below, one way to refer to the research process as the inquiry goes around full circle and cycles back to where it began. Due to the cycling action, the researcher is farther along in the process and either enlightened or has more questions the longer the cycle repeats or moves along. Regardless, the researcher will have a deeper understanding with each cycle.

Discover: one of the action verbs used to describe the inquiry process or the research that teacher researchers do. One of the words in the School District motto. I think closely linked to curiosity and a trait modeled by my mother to me as a young child. Defined as ‘to learn or gain knowledge of through study or observation.’

Framing: Defined as ‘to conceive or formulate…for a particular purpose’. Makes me think of how Anja’s group drew the frame around the idea they had discussed that second day in class. For the inquiry process, the framing of the question is key in that it needs to be open-ended to allow for continual discovery.

Humility: Defined as ‘the quality or state of being humble; modest about one’s status or accomplishments.’ I think this word is important for two reasons – one, teacher research probably brings a good dose of reality into one’s practice and, for some, (most, I would think), humility would result. Two, the more honorable and respectable way to put yourself out into the world, especially once you start actually doing some exciting, groundbreaking work that could bring notoriety, fame, and cause people to actual take notice.

Messy: describes the process of teacher research, probably because it also describes the process of teaching. Synonyms are untidy, disorganized, chaotic, complicated – right brain process comes to mind. Makes me think about the art room, paint and teaching Kindergarten.  🙂

Quest: My favourite word for the moment to describe the MEd process overall. As I’ve written elsewhere:

I like the idea of the MEd year as a learning quest more than a learning journey. You can go on a journey fairly passively or by force, but a quest is usually self motivated and there is the sense of being driven to accomplish the quest. Quest suggests ambition whereas, to me anyway, journey suggests a leisurely travel experience. Also, the word quest forms the root of the word question so there’s a nice little correlation there as well.

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Defined by others as ‘a search, esp. an arduous one for something that is greatly desired’. Synonyms include pursuit, search, chase, endeavor, grope, hunt, inquiry, and probe.

As a verb, it’s defined as ‘to seek; search (often fol. by for or after)’ and synonyms are aspire, pursue, seek, chase, fish, hunt, search, stalk, strive. It’s also defined as’ to search for something (campaign, crusade, explore, hunt, search) or grope, probe’. One last definition is to pursue or search for; seek, explore, investigate, pursue, search.

Rub: What annoys you? What bothers you? What rubs you the wrong way? From the first day of class, and one of the first questions we had to answer. One of the ways to find a good starting point for research is to look for the tensions in your practice, the things that rub you the wrong way. What really cranks you up?

Specific: Exact, precise. It’s important to ensure that the language one uses in the inquiry process, especially in the actual inquiry questions, is exact in meaning. Hence my MEd dictionary and my desire to buy/find a really good dictionary for this next year.

Spiral: Defined as ‘a circling around a fixed point that constantly increases or decreases in distance from it, in either a flat or a three-dimensional plane; coil or helix.’. The fixed point would be the original inquiry question or initial wonderings. Connected by circular motion to ‘cycle’ above.

Struggle: Another word that jumped out at me from the readings. Yes, this year will be a fight. Other definitions I liked include, ‘to go forward by expending great energy’ and ‘to contend strenuously with a difficult problem or situation.’ Both fit nicely…

Wonder: What my mother taught me and one of the ways I think people should view the world. One of the greatest aspects of childhood. Once you lose this childlike quality, then the closing of the mind sets in and you get old (my humble opinion, of course).

I like this word even more now that I’ve looked it up. So many definitions…

As a noun, ‘wonder can be a thing or occurrence that causes admiration or amazement; marvel’, or ‘the feeling that is caused by something amazing, surprising, or awe-inspiring.’ I like the feeling part, I’m all for gut instincts and intuition. Other words with similar meanings include marvel, miracle, phenomenon, prodigy, wonderment, curiosity, nonesuch, phenomenon, rarity, sight, spectacle, surprise, wonderwork, admiration, amazement, awe, fascination, stupefaction, surprise, doubt, skepticism, confusion, and  uncertainty.

As a verb, ‘to be curious or skeptical about something’ with synonyms including conjecture, deliberate, ponder, puzzle, reflect, and think. Also defined as ‘to be curious or doubtful about’ with similar words including conjecture, doubt, inquire, ponder, query, question.

Definitions other than my own were accessed on October 10, 2010 from www.wordsmyth.ne­t.
Imagery by scottwills on Flickr.com.

Becoming a Teacher Researcher: Shifting, Stretching and Spiraling

330655247_a488fc76ac_zToday my identity shifted a little. Today there was a subtle stretching of who I am and where I’m headed in life. I was warned that this change would be uncomfortable.  But that’s okay, this change is by choice.

As of today, I’m officially a teacher researcher.

I started the final year of my Masters of Education in Educational Practice at Simon Fraser University this morning. Eleven months of intense academic study during which I will read numerous books, work through various articles and readings, create a proposal for an inquiry of my choosing, complete a field study in my classroom/school/school district, write a major research paper and present my learning to my cohort and professors. Dr. Kelly, the professor for this first course, described the entire MEd experience as a spiral of learning and my understanding is that readings will be revisited, ideas will reappear and the process will build upon itself with time.

It’s a fantastic challenge.

It seems to me that the first part of the process is to determine where I fit in as a teacher researcher into the vastness that is the field of education. Before that can be determined, however, I have to take a good, hard look at myself and figure out who I am as a person and as an educator. Teaching is, for those of you looking from the outside in, an incredibly personal experience and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a teacher able to separate their professional and personal self. So, a few thoughts on “Where I’m From”, one of the homework assignments for tonight…

  • I’m from Irish, Scottish and Cree people
  • I’m from the natural world and need to be a part of it
  • I’m from a beautiful part of the world full of huge mountains, breath-taking valleys, and a rugged coastline
  • I’m from a little town surrounded by a rich variety of wildlife – bears, deer, coyotes, wolves, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, salmon, sturgeon, steelhead, rainbow trout, eagles, owls and more – and I love that I share that home with them
  • I’m from a city where the mountains touch the sea
  • I’m from a succession of strong women – intelligent, passionate, intuitive, loving, wise
  • I’m from a big immediate family, but a smallish extended one

The other part of the process that I learned about today was how to read. Really read, not skim through, not decode and forget, not glide over the surface, but take-your-time-to-actually-ingest-the-text type reading. That reading requires two things often missing in our busy world – time and thought.

240234623_1d7b8b4b87To illustrate the notion of ‘reading well’, we read  The Ethics of Reading: A Traveler’s Guide. To be honest, the title makes me think of universe imagery every time I look at it. The article, by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, expands the definition of what it means to read so widely that the universe imagery makes perfect sense and I’m wondering when during the first reading that picture appeared in my mind.

In the article, Rorty offers advice and lists questions to ask when reading to more fully understand the text. Advice such as read, then set the work aside and see how it affected you: questions to ask about the author to more completely experience the meaning inside, behind and within the words.

It was late in the day, as I was packing up to leave, that I experienced an ‘aha’ moment, or completed my first little spiral of learning. The Rorty article included details on what questions to ask about the ‘historical author’ of a piece of writing. Rorty offers the following advice:

Identify the historical author. What was his education? what had he read? What was his early environment and experience?

Isn’t that exactly what the first homework assignment was about? Hadn’t we been led through a process in which we thought about and shared who we were, where we came from, what our experiences have been? I think we were asked to identify ourselves, the future author of the final research paper, in order to situate our own thinking in preparation for the stretching, the shifting and the learning to come.

Today my identity shifted a little. Today there was a subtle stretching of who I am and where I’m headed in life. I was warned that this change would be uncomfortable, especially at the beginning.

But then, stretching is somewhat uncomfortable, isn’t it? If you don’t feel a slight tug, nothing’s stretched at all.

Imagery by SubyRex and Emdadi on Flickr.

The Calm Before the MEd Storm

It’s official; I’m in! In September I  start the final year of my Masters degree at Simon Fraser University. I received my letter last week and already I can feel the upcoming change. I swing between feeling extremely excited to feeling absolute panic! I’m aware that the daily rhythm of my life, which has Storm lightfinally achieved balance and is almost relaxed, will change  dramatically for the year of study. Life is fairly calm right now, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it was just the calm before the storm. I was right; the MEd storm lays directly in my path!

I’m looking forward to the opportunity to record learning, with all the accompanying struggles and successes, on this blog. During TLITE, I kept an electronic journal using Microsoft Word. That was a stretch for me as I’ve always kept a journal, but it was always with pen and paper. Six months after TLITE ended, I started this blog in hopes of maintaining professional momentum. It has served a variety of purposes since November 2008 and soon will serve as one way to record and extend my  learning the MEd year.

One thing that I found with my electronic journal was that I would lapse into personal writing at times. I haven’t done that as much in my blog because I try to stay aware of the audience that comes with writing in a public space and the digital footprint that I’m leaving with every keystroke or click of the mouse. It will be good for my brain to be forced to shuffle through and clarify the professional from the personal this fall.

Not surprisingly, even though I don’t start until September, my mind has Cotton Cloudsalready begun. Thursday morning I woke up with enough ideas to complete two years of coursework, let alone one. But that’s another post. I think I’ll let my brain enjoy the calm seas of contemplation a little longer before I share my ideas with the world…

Images from Flickr: Cotton Clouds by rob_surreal, Storm light by jekrub