According to Rowland (2000, p. 4), thoughtfulness is a vital enabling capability for effective teaching. Rowland was writing about higher education but the same may be said for teaching at all levels. Please consider Rowland’s proposition as you read on.
This week I drafted an orientation activity for teachers wishing to involve their students in the i witness program. I had reservations about the density–abstraction of thought in the document; however for me it is important for participating teachers to work on the 2016 theme of cultural awareness themselves. Why? I believe that making a difference to students’ cultural awareness cannot be fulsomely executed by teachers who don’t have experiential understanding of that goal / way of relating to the world / capacity and habit themselves. Let’s take a moment to mull over this …
What I’m about to write may be coloured by the i witness teachers’ orientation activity that I’ve been grappling with lately. You can read it here: http://bit.ly/1TCYT6z.
In my doctoral thesis I mused that
"one’s personal teaching philosophy inevitably colours the student learning experience somewhere along the line, however explicitly or implicitly such ‘vibes’ are expressed. Students can learn much from what is not spoken" (McKenzie, 2014, p. 7).
We can explore that idea through reflective imagination. Imagine a student looking up from a difficult exercise and gazing at the teacher, who in turn is staring out the window. (Or change the scenario to an online teaching-learning context if this is more your cup of tea; the principle stays the same.) What is happening for the student and for the teacher in that moment?
It is very possible that the two states of heart/mind in this vignette – the student’s and the teacher’s – have no bearing on my warm, fuzzy thought that a teacher’s philosophy can leave its mark on students, even in silence. But can you contrive a hypothetical in which past, accumulated impressions of one actor formed in the other now cause to stir an unshaped thought or feeling or intention that bears on the other’s humanity? Mmm?
In my 'struggle of writing' post of 29 March I suggested that (a) the curriculum goal of cultural awareness can be approached through attention to the relations between people from diverse cultural backgrounds; but equally, that (b) the cultural awareness theme can be – in a sense needs to be – considered in the light of who we are and who we are becoming. ‘Cultural awareness’ is not a commodity, nor merely a skill. It is, at least, all of the following – a goal, a way of relating to the world, and a capacity–habit. Little wonder then that I found myself homing in on articulating one’s value position as a useful starting point for teachers preparing themselves as student guides for i witness 2016.
I intuit sympathetic resonances among the following: personal philosophy infusing itself in gestures, actions and in silences … value positions infusing themselves in our thoughts, feelings and intentions … personal becoming (personal ontology) as concretisation of personal philosophy and personal values … personal becoming as participation in the human phenomenon (see McKenzie 2014b).
At this stage we are uncertain about how we are going to engage teachers in the i witness program, but I’m sharing the teachers’ orientation activity more widely to contribute to thinking about professional development in cultural awareness education.
Would you like to post a reflection on anything here to share with me and others? I have created a Padlet page which will be accessible only to those who register interest. Write to me – adrmcke@gmail.com – and say: Please give me access to the Two states of heart/mind activity page. I will send you the link. To access the activity page, be sure to login with the same email address you used to write to me.
References
• McKenzie, A. (2014a). Meaning making: A university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century. Saarbrucken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. Available from https://www.morebooks.de/store/gb/book/meaning-making:-a-university-curriculum-framework-for-the-21st-century/isbn/978-3-659-52667-1.
• McKenzie, A. (2014b). Changing course: The human phenomenon, deep aligning, living meaningfully. Thought piece. Available from http://bit.ly/ChangingCourse0.
• Rowland, S. (2000). The enquiring university teacher. Ballmoor, Bucks: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Image: Freeimages.com / Asif Akbar | http://www.freeimages.com/photo/sign-1307398|All rights reserved