Live to teach

18 April 2013

 

Reading _Cheryl Craig 2006 The nature of teacher Knowledge.
Schwarb, 1969,1971,973

• The idea of professors working alongside teachers in schools, fantastic, now lets see how engagement works in practice with year 9. I would love to see how that really works, the relationship formed between the two. Who wins, Mr D cult of personality or Guru of education…fun times.
• I also agree that classrooms are too complex to be viewed from one viewpoint. (Jackson 1968) Perhaps we can find solutions to possible questions??what are the questions?
• The ‘cult of efficiency’ Callahan 1962 cited by Eisner schools producing little of ‘enduring quality’. I have seen this in stereotypes and it worries me, our director of teaching and learning who turned a school upside down to meet the needs of the implementation of Every chance to learn policy ACT. Implemented in 2008. compounded by the fact we had registration in thaty year. Yes we were complient, yes we passed with flying colours, however, the process in which it was done was painful and to the detriment of all middle management that were having to swing to the whims of an individual and their technocratic love of excel spreadsheets for mapping learning outcomes. That person is now promoted off the basis of this achievement to school leader at another school. It was not the outcome that sat uncomfortably with me, it was the process that was strict, autocratic and undemocratic. Only one person understood the process, could change the spreadsheet information, and once that person left the set up which was innovative and in theory made a complex issue very understandable, now became over ambitious with no one around to carry on the work or even to build upon that knowledge. It was scrapped twelve months later with a new direct or of teaching and learning and a promise of National Curriculum just around the corner.

I am also interested in the author’s remarks that a teacher creates knowledge, and Clandin and Connolly’s metaphor that teachers are curriculum makers. 1992. I sits well iwyth the comment of Dr Wesley Imms and his key note address at the NGA Canberra, National Art education conference, when he commented that when a school hires a teacher they hire a curriculum. January 2011.