I'm an art educator...almost

Clockwise from top left:


Extraordinary Huge Snowball Sea
Boooring Finland
Pink Snot
Northern Lights Exploded
The End
End of Colorful Math  Dog

Sucker for Social Pressure - 365

I didn't take the camera with me to uni today; I thought Gábor deserved an opportunity to play with it a little. It is after all supposedly our camera. Besides, I went to an exhibition opening at the city art museum this evening that I felt sure would provide some wonderfully colourful photos. I am certain it would have…if it weren’t for the fact that photographing exhibitions is socially unaccepted (if not outright against the rules). It was interesting though, particularly since I am going to be running some workshops with school groups in the museum based on Jaakko Mattila’s exhibited works. Thus, I still wanted today’s picture to be related…I give you…the flyer.

Art for Nowhere

This semester at uni I am taking :

• Global Education
• Educational Policy Planning and Leadership
• Art Minor (painting, drawing sculpture, photography, art history evironmental art...etc)
• and continuing work on my thesis (topic: Art As Research in Education - focus on A/r/tography)

 
 

...This article by John Tusa (reposted from nowhereisland.org) manages to bring together everything I am studying at the moment (and also made me smile and LOL)

Week 5: 8 October 2011

Sir John Tusa

British arts broadcaster and journalist

An arts policy for Nowhereisland

No child will be denied a full education in the arts at their widest.
 
Every child will be read to each night.
 
Every school will start its day by singing songs together.
 
Every child and young person will be able to learn a musical instrument to the stage where they can – if they wish – play in public or with others.
 
Every education establishment  will base its teaching on the knowledge and belief that the arts benefit learning of every kind.
 
No child or young person will be told that “the arts are not for you”. The arts belong to everyone.
 
Every child will have the opportunity to look, learn, listen and make.
 
Every pupil will learn about the traditions on which contemporary arts practice is based.
 
Every teacher will be qualified to communicate enthusiasm for and knowledge of more than one art form.
 
No school or educational establishment will divide its teaching into either the sciences or the humanities. There is only One Culture and each reinforces the other.
 
Every child will have time in its curriculum to do nothing and learn how to be bored.
 
All higher education and all arts venues will integrate their learning and performance activities.
 
All government policy will be based on the assumption that healthy and vibrant communities are centred around the arts.
 
All government policy will address education and the arts in the same department.
 
No government will regard the arts and education as the workhorses of business and commerce.
 
No government will tell education and the arts that they should be “like businesses” or “more business-like”. All governments will acknowledge that the arts and education run themselves in ways that are relevant for their disciplines.
 
All arts organisations will accept full responsibility for running themselves efficiently and effectively.
 
Every arts organisation will have one or more representative from business on their governing board. Every company will have one or more representatives from the arts and education on their governing board.
 
Government will set a strict cap on how much money arts organisations can spend on management consultants.
 
No arts organisation will set out its aims and priorities in “powerpoint” presentations which consist of bullet points only and contain no verbs or complete sentences.
 
No arts organisation will use in its Vision or Mission Statement words such as “excellent”, “passionate”, “leading”, “world class” or any other word, phrase or notion derived from management speak.
 
No arts or education establishment will regard, treat, deal with or otherwise think of its audiences or students as “customers”.
 
Every arts and education body will officially proclaim and announce that its activities are fundamentally and intentionally useless. They will ignore and disregard any request or demand to demonstrate that they are useful before they are valuable.
 
No arts body will be funded if they declare their aim to be primarily instrumental.
 
Arts and education bodies will not be asked to demonstrate the ”relevance” of what they do as a condition of funding.
 
Every elected representative will spend at least one night per week at an arts event or performance of some kind.
 
No prime minister will avoid attendance at arts events on the grounds that they court unpopularity by doing so. On the contrary they will earn it.
 
No prime minister will attempt to court voter popularity by claiming to like current pop groups when in truth they do not listen to them.
 
Every government will ensure that those who give money to the arts in their lifetime receive the benefit of tax concessions in their lifetime.
 
No minister will refer to the arts as “elitist”, “irrelevant”, or merely “nice to have”.
 
No Secretary of State for the Arts shall be precluded from becoming Prime Minister.

"Homework is more important than playing with your friends!"... umm... are you sure about that?

One of the problems with studying education is that you start to for some serious opinions (and arguments) about what the purpose of school is and what school should be. It becomes impossible to find a school that matches exactly with your educational philosophy. One of the things that we like about Waldorf-Steiner education is the importance it gives to play and imagination; play and imagination are intrinsic to a child’s development (yes, we went with the Steiner school – the story of that will come soon).

When I had heard the Lily's teacher had told her today that doing her homework was more important then playing with her friends I got seriously pissed off. Personally, I don't agree with homework (I will discuss exactly why in some other post sometime) but wither you are with giving homework or not, the question of which is more important, homework or play, is a separate issue entirely. Her homework was to write out a line each of the letters "d", "e" and "f"; repetition of work already done in school. If we compare only the "learning experience" of playing with her friends, there is a (as far as I am concerned) a clear winner when it comes to "importance".

Last week Lily spent an afternoon playing at her friend Milla's home.  Milla is an old friend of Lily's from daycare; she’s a shy, quiet girl and when they play together Lily tends to take the lead. Lily didn’t speak a word of Finnish (despite understanding almost everything after only a few months) which meant that whenever she was playing she always just joined in or followed along.  She rarely challenged the “rules of the game” or initiated play. “Following” remained Lily’s way of playing even once she started to speak Finnish and when we were in Hungary so playing with Milla helps her to develop initiative, it makes her feel comfortable and learn how to express her wishes and ideas.

Aside from character development, taking the lead means that she is generating speech in Finnish, and a lot of it.  While Steiner school (in theory) puts an emphasis on play, the classroom activities are mainly teacher led – listening, which is a whole different cognitive process to speech production.  Lily didn’t use Finnish at all last year (and forgot almost all of the language) and we don’t use Finnish at home so she is kind of “playing catch-up” with the other kids in terms of vocabulary and complexity of language use.  Any chance for her to be in an environment where she is using Finnish will be of a huge benefit to her when it comes to being in a Finnish classroom.

It isn’t even just the Finnish language that Lily gains from being in a Finnish home but also Finnish norms. In any culture (and its institutions) there are certain things that are just done or just are, that need no explanation. However when you are not fully living within that culture sometimes these things just don’t make sense and do need to be explained. Spending time in more “typically Finnish” environments help Lily (and us) to understand why some things in her school are as they are.

This is only one afternoon with one friend. How about when she plays in the playground in front of our apartment? The 3 kids she plays with most are all native German speakers with limited Finnish and/or English – Did I mention that German is one of the languages they are learning in school? Where do you think she will learn more German? School or the playground?

What about what others can lean through Lily. Also last week we had one of the neighbours’ kids at our place for the whole afternoon. The child’s father is a supporters of Perussuomalaiset (True Finns (or The Finns – they recently changed their English name)), a far right/ anti-immigration party, yet the child is now playing in the home of immigrants, building a friendship with an immigrant child. And through Lily we are making connections with the whole family. We are making an effort to try to understand their perspective and we are challenging their perceptions of “the immigrant” or “the other”.

So what do you thing Lily learns more from? Which is more important?

But then all this rant of mine is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what she learns or which teaches her more. Frankly the simple argument is. She is a child. There is nothing more important for children than play.

...thrice!

I am on a serious winning streak apparently. This morning I got an email from jojoebi at A Bit of This & A Bit of That telling me I had won the book "Playful Learning" by Mariah Brueh in the blog tour giveaway. I had come across the Playful Learning blog when a crafty blog I read advertised a photo/visual journal course for kids. Although I couldn't do the course with Lily (lack of funds again...sometimes I really hate being poor), the stuff Mariah does looked interesting and when her book came out I followed along on the blog tour. The prize not only included the book but also a place on her Playful Learning Spaces eCourse.So  I will be doing a course with her after all.

Thank you Mariah and Jojoebi for the prizes.

School Choice - Help wanted!

Friday was Lily's last day of 1st Grade...well until she starts 1st grade again in August. Different country. Different system. Different language of instruction.

Before we came to Hungary we had wondered whither she would go to 1^st or 2^nd grade after a year here but (I think) we are (fairly) certain that she will go to first grade. Yes, Lily can read confidently, can interact well, is creative; she has no problem in school - so you may be wondering why she is repeating. Well, most first graders in Finland can read when they start school (and those who don’t learn pretty quickly), are interactive and creative. Children, when allowed to be children, can learn these skills without force or institutionalisation. Lily, after a year in school, is on a par with her non-schooled Finnish peers.

The school-starting-age is, in my opinion, the first area (of many areas) where the Finnish education system gets it right.

The decision we have to make however is – Which school should she go to?

Should we continue our relationship with Waldorf-Steiner education and have her go to Oulu Steiner School OR should we go with Norssi, the university practice school (and more than likely our local/neighbourhood school?

Cast your vote:

I am only joking with the poll but actually I (we) would appreciate thoughts on this from people since many of you have experience of being a student, a practicing teacher or a teacher at one or both of these school, while Gábor and I have fairly limited experience of them. We really should have made this decision a few months ago but have been having such difficulty making a choice. In the very same moment I can think that both are the best choice – The problem is, both are good choices it becomes difficult to say which is the best.

What makes it worse is that almost everything I can think of can be both a plus and a minus and Gábor and I really over analyse things. For example:

Without even considering Pedagogical Philosophies, let’s take something as simple as location. The Steiner school is much further from where we will be living (well about 4km) compared to Norssi, which is about 500m plus it is straight across the road from the Education department  of the university where I will spend my days.

Blue = schools, Red = home, Green = uni

Going to Norssi would mean safe and easy trips to and from school, and she would be living close by to her school friends. Steiner would be much longer journeys and are we as parents brave enough to let her go it alone? It would also mean here friends would  be scattered around the city, creating 2 communities; the school community and the home/neighbourhood community. But then Norssi would have 2 communities too. The (all powerful) teacher is normally from outside the local community and  I don’t think parents become part of the school community in Norssi to the same extent as in Steiner. Perhaps even the trip to school is a good thing; it gives Lily the chance to be responsible which would be denied from her if she were to remain in the security of Syynimaa. It wouldn’t exactly be a dangerous trip, it is cycle path the whole way with only one road (with traffic lights) to cross plus a little bit of exercise is an excellent way to prepare your mind and body for learning. But ...what about those mornings in February when it is -30 degrees, perhaps it is a bit cruel for her to have to cycle in that, maybe closer is better...

You see this is how back and forward we go with “location” so imagine what we are like when it comes to pedagogy.

Any comment/suggestions/recommendations are welcome (just try not to confuse me even more).

Today she learned the letter “D”

A couple of years ago, Lily and her friend taught each other to read and write in Finnish. They would write notes to each other, make puzzle books filled with word puzzles and write stories and annotate pictures. She learned to read pretty well in Finnish and was also doing pretty well with reading English (despite it being a silly language with spelling that makes no sense). Since moving to Hungary her Hungarian reading has excelled. She comes home from the library with a stack of books each week and laps them up. Despite complaining that English is the hardest language that she knows to read in, she read me the bedtime stories last week. Then the other day when I was asking her about what they had been doing in school, she announced "today we learned the letter d".

She learned? Really?

Initially I reminded that she learned "D" about 3 years ago, so she didn't actually learn it in class. But I have reconsidered that. She said "WE learned ...D". If we consider that knowledge emerges collaboratively within a context then perhaps Lily was right; THEY did learn D. Ahh Lily, a natural postmodernist.

On a separate but (vaguely) related note: All vowels are sonorants, as are the speech sounds l and m. Therefore "Liliom" is a name that is made for singing.

What is knowledge? ....and what is the point of exams?

This week I made the odd decision to abandon exams. I may seem like a quitter or some nonsense like that but I think I have reason. As a student teacher I have an interest in learning (doing it and in the concept) and don’t take these things lightly.

I went along to an exam the other day for a course I had been doing; The Social Uses of Language. It has been a very interesting and useful course covering topics such as English as a Lingua Franca, Language Planning and Policy and Language and Identity. There has been a lot of reading for the course, sometimes as many a 5 articles for a 90 minute class, but on the whole they have been well selected and thought provoking. The thought provoking part is the key to where I am going here. In Oulu, with our study journals and open book exams, I have become accustomed to the idea that it is not the knowledge in the books that is important when it comes to exams but the knowledge I create from the books; my thoughts, my reflections my connection, my questions, my (attempts at) answers. Bearing this in mind; when I looked at the exam questions which wanted me to reiterate the authors knowledge presented in the articles I was a little (re. hugely) unprepared. Don’t you want to hear my knowledge? Don’t you want to know my thoughts? I have so many. In the end all I wrote was a not saying I will have to sign up for the resit.

I came home utterly disheartened. I don’t take failure well. It didn’t last long though because like I said, I have lots of thoughts so it didn’t take long for me to think about this in a different way.

To pass the exam I would need to reread all 30-something articles again using a different lens; I would need to memorise the authors’ knowledge. But do I need to memorise their knowledge when I already have my own? The answer I cane to is “only if I want to get credits”. However there are other ways to get credits, and I will always have the knowledge that was constructed though participating in the course.

I have a new plan and I am very happy.

So yes, I have abandoned the exams, I am not going to spend the month of exam leave rereading articles and memorising data and (in the case of syntax) trying to understand things that I simply don’t get. Instead I am spending the month doing concentrated work on my thesis, and I am filled with joy. It’s new and exciting and thoughts are rushing around in my head and it hurts because with a/r/tography, even the way of thinking is new and my brain is trying to resist, yet I’m inspired. I have dug out my sketchbooks but still trying to get over my nerves and make he first marks on the pages.

Who defines "student centred learning"?