learning from experience
What is a good metaphor for teaching? The lecture on the 20 September with Scott and Caitlin was thought-provoking. I often ruminate as I listen to others, allowing their spoken words to help me along the way in my own thinking. In particular I was thinking about my own evolving attitude towards pedagogy and outcomes. Is a bushfire a good analogy? A spark fanned will create a conflagration that will set alight all it comes into contact with? I rejected that one- too much aggressive arsonist tendencies (picture people with pillowcases on their heads running through the night with burning brands……Creepy!). Then I thought about the analogy proposed by Scott, that teaching is part of a landscape as a “dialogic, imagined space” wherein teaching, dialogue and learning can take place. This seemed much more harmonious to my vision. Then I thought about how this applies to writing. I agree with Bulfin when he says how we must negotiate the politics of our profession and know that the discourses that we have with each other and with our students are ”mutually generative” and “multi dimensional” (Bulfin 2005).
However, I couldn’t help but think that with all the arguments about teaching that are festering in the media at the moment that any investigation in a public forum (and this document is a public forum too) can be prone to veer off the road and go careening through the suburban scrub like a typical 4 wheel-driving, middle-class ignoramus.  [4WD] There is a truth to this, in that our incursions and excursions into English, into writing, are not a linear process, but are open to all the space that that we occupy- pedagogically, socially and philosophically. I believe writing is a journey, and that the roads we follow- the curriculum we create and occupy, and the collaborations we have with each other- are signposts towards an end. However, in this journey it is the process that is just as important as the eventual arrival at the destination. This is a contentious point, as many would argue that the destination is all important- witness the derailing of the ‘English Lite’ train: [English Lite]. People get very emotional about all of this stuff- how do I keep a level head in teaching writing when there are accidents waiting to happen if you so much as look at an approach that might be different?
So here begins the journey. It is easy to get complacent when you are traveling down the same road again and again (I imagine this results in perpetual ennuis for some teachers…after all, if you anticipate an experience to be dull, it inevitably fulfils that expectation). Witness me in my second teaching round. I get to teach…….drum roll……..year 7 poetry!!!!!!!! “Hooray”, I think, “I already did this in my last teaching round; couldn’t I have been given something more challenging, like Year 11 English?” Even worse, my Supervising Teacher (ST) is somewhat of a control freak, ready to switch on the harpy voice and the dagger glare if a student so much as breathes without permission. Even better, the poetry experience has already been fully determined by an orange workbook (with all the poems to be studied and the questions the students must fill our after reading the poems.) Orange means danger ! Warning !!! It is very regimented and not at all how I would go about it. I must read out the poem, and then the students silently write their answers. This is a challenge for me; if I am going to try to unleash written creativity, how can I un-leash the poor students in the first place?
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