Week 3

What is a teacher? What is a learner? What is knowledge?

These seem like simple questions but actually, they are quite complex. In the past few weeks, I have learned that there are many answers to these questions; all are valid. When I consider my own mental model, that is, the values and beliefs I hold as an educator and the assumptions that arise because of them, I see that they have changed, not only through my career but also since starting my journey with Ontario Tech U.  Adichie's TED Talk on The Danger of A Single Story is an important stepping stone to really understand this. We are all multi-dimensional people and that includes our students, their parents, community stakeholders, staff, and administration. Taking on a curious approach is critical to finding the most important starting point about education, that is, Who is the teacher? Who is the learner? and What understandings do they need to move them forward. This may mean challenging our values and beliefs and changing the lens through which we see ourselves and the world.

When I look at the slides from Juuso's lesson on creating Rubrics, I can see that these questions are extremely important. Fairness in teacher-created rubrics as opposed to student-created rubrics, or even co-created rubrics is something that must be considered. Students all have their own stories. It may be that when Jusso says, "What we assess and how we assess student learning matters" (2022), it may also mean that students be permitted to have different outcomes (expectations or skills), evaluated. Each learner may have different needs that fit their own context.

Reflection

We were given the assignment for weeks two and three of Principles of Learning to choose three electronic items to share about learning. Although this task was taken off of our to-do list, I thought the exercise worth doing. Like facing a box of chocolates, I had difficulty selecting only three. There are life lessons everywhere. Last week I picked an obvious image, The School of Athens, painted by Raphael. It depicts great scholars who are lifelong learners.

This week, I chose You Raise Me Up because my students always had the capacity to make me think outside of myself and look deeper within. That thinking fits with the lessons learned in our class in the past couple of weeks. We are all teachers, students, and agents of change. When I went through the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto in 1992, one of the first assignments was to develop a philosophy of teaching based on a metaphor. I developed my metaphor as an ocean beach and each class a tide pool. In each tide pool, like a classroom, we end up with all types of creatures. What washes up in our tidepools each September can be challenging, novel, and intriguing. Anemones and sea urchins, starfish, and snails, crustaceans and mussels; some are predators, some grazers, some that passively sit to await the return tide to whisk them off to another place. We need to get to know them all. At hight-tide, we are floated away to, perhaps, find another tide pool.

The song sung by fans of the Liverpool Football Club, as sung by these 95,000 fans at a game in Australia never fails to bring a tear to my eye. It is a brilliant and kindly reminder that no matter who we are, we Never Walk Alone. From 1994 until 2000, I taught in a school that had a rash of student suicides. Many of them were teenagers who took my Personal Life Management course. Now I know that many were there trying to find a part of themselves to love. Many were successful. Seven were not. 

As a mother in a blended family, with four grown children, four grandchildren, and three great grandlings, this loss continues to haunt me. Of course, it wasn't my fault. Of course they had family and personal situations beyond my control. Of course one can't see into the minds of others. Yet these losses were still my own. I was a child in a family with a mother who endured pervasive mental illness and took it out on her family. Of her four children, one died of suicide, one is an alcoholic, one never talks to anyone and has trust issues, and then there is me. The kids in my mother's family understand depression. 

At the end of my time in secondary, I transferred to the elementary panel to teach Kindergarten and that became my happy place. I all of the grades the grades there for almost twenty years talking to children about their identities, inner strength, life's paths, and belonging. For the final decade of my work I taught first grade or split one/two classes. One wouldn't think Grade 1 students think about suicide but they do. The most important thing I taught them was you never walk alone.

The next stop in our story this week is this beautiful song based on poetry written by Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe, O.C., and sung by Kalolin Johnson. It speaks to my understanding of learning. Every learner has a background that we cannot fully understand as educators. Because of this, our first job is to be learners ourselves. I write this after reading the book by Parker J. Palmer which addresses the disconnect between teachers, students, and subjects by encouraging teachers to develop their identity as educators. By starting from this point, we can better serve our students. Kalolin's piece reminds us to find out as much about our students as we can so that we can better meet their needs. Nobody has a single story (Adichie, 2009).

Each week, we begin our Principles of Learning class with Dr. Ruttenberg-Rozen (2022), reading a Land Acknowledgement. The particular phrasing of this paragraph's conclusion is an important one to me: "Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies with Indigenous peoples, then it does not have to define our future." It is an important message and is relevant to people of many backgrounds and orientations who struggle to find their own way.