Towards a Personally Negotiated Understanding

Earlier today, Christopher D. Sessums and I delivered our WiAOC 2007 presentation, entitled Personal Learning Environments - Exploring Teacher Professional Development in a Networked World. We used talkshoe.com to deliver our presentation. It was a good learning experience to use a Web 2.0 tool that we had never used before. Talkshoe.com allows participants to listen to the live stream or register and download a client in order to call in to the show using Skype.

If you would like to comment on our presentation, you can post a comment in response to this entry or on our talkshoe page.

We wanted our presentation to be an informal discussion rather than a list of definitive thoughts on the subject. We decided to explore the potential impact that the read/write web can have on teacher professional development. I think many of us are still trying to figure out how the world of Web 2.0 can best complement existing teacher education programmes and practices, and how it can best be used in our own everyday practice as educators.

Personally, I was interested in exploring the benefits of Action Research as a way for teachers to become critical and reflective practitioners. I believe that asking questions about what we do in our classrooms and why we do it is an important step towards engaging in a pedagogy of possibility and participation. When we begin to ask questions about our own practices, we become aware of the impact of reflection and the importance of personal freedom in charting our own course as learners and researchers. That freedom to research our own practice is an important step in understanding why all learners need to be free to explore and follow paths that they find relevant and interesting. It seems to me that teachers who experience the empowering effects of Action Research understand that we are all storytellers that that we need environments that foster the development of individual voices. How can we possibly help our students be co-contributors and researchers if we ourselves don't engage as learners and experience what it means to construct knowledge?

The importance of creating environments that can support the development of individual voices and encourage personally meaningful engagement with ideas was another topic that I mentioned during our presentation. John Dewey believed that "learning is a product and reward of occupation with subject matter." He believed that good teachers give their students something to do and not something to learn. He also believed that education takes place indirectly through the medium of the environment. I believe that Dewey's words could be interpreted today as an encouragement to create online environments - online extensions of our classrooms - where students can explore ideas that they find personally meaningful and relevant. It is my contention that teacher professional development should be about learning how to foster these environments in order to engage students in their personal searches for meaning. In order to accomplish that, it seems to me, we need to embrace Action Research, we need to become critical of our practices, and we need to start perceiving our role as more than that of a handout technician whose only responsibility is to transfer knowledge. Our response to Web 2.0 should be more involved and more complex than switching to blogs or wikis as a method of course delivery. Classrooms where these tools exist and are used are not necessarily Classrooms 2.0. They are quite simply classrooms where students write and interact online in addition to writing in their notebooks and interacting in the classroom. A true Classroom 2.0 is a place where the teacher and her students are engaged in narrative inquiry. It is a place where the participants engage in constructing narratives of experience, and where the curriculum is redefined as personal journey through life or, as Connelly and Clandinin have phrased it, as "one's life course of action" that we chart as we engage with personally relevant ideas and travel towards a personally negotiated understanding of the topic and of who we are as learners, as educators, as researchers, as people.

When educators create, enter, participate in, and sustain communities that support independent research, critical thought, reflection, and meaning-making, they become what Henry Giroux refers to as "transformative intellectuals." They understand that students are active agents, that knowledge needs to be questioned and problematized, that dialogical methods of inquiry are most effective learning tools, and that all learners need a place where they can make sense of their own selves and explore their relationships to others and the world around them.

Knowledge needs to be created, re-created, co-created, and problematized by students and teachers in their classrooms on a daily basis. Classrooms come to life and become places of cognitive engagement when all of the participants, students and teachers, interact with each other's texts and discoveries. Many of us have already created environments in our classrooms that support this culture of inquiry, participation, and interaction. We use blogs, wikis, podcasts, and many other Web 2.0 tools to help students understand that knowledge is an active process of construction and not something that arrives in a textbook, neatly compartmentalized into chapters or units. I believe that the next step is to challenge ourselves as educators to become reflective and critical thinkers who understand that teaching is a form of inquiry. It is not enough to create a blogging community or start a wiki and let the students interact within in. We need to be part of that environment too. We need to enter it as participants, as learners, as researchers. Then, we need to reflect on our experiences and openly share our findings. It is by telling stories about our classrooms and about our own newly-discovered places in our classrooms that we can best learn to understand the life of the community in which we participate and the kind of interactive, multidimensional, and immersive world that has come to define the lives of our students.

Learning to Listen

A row of tanks rolled by in the distance, and two planes flew in the sky above her, although she didn't see any bombs falling from them. Parvana didn't pay them any attention. Tanks were normal. Bombs were normal. Why couldn't eating be normal? They had salvaged what they could after the house was bombed. There was a bit of rice spilled on the ground. They picked it out of the dirt grain by grain. There wasn't enough water to cook the rice, and no cook-pot, so the children had to chew the rice kernels raw.

The above passage comes from Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis, a novel that I decided to read with my grade seven students this term. It was not an easy decision to make. The novel is about about a 12-year-old girl who sets off to search for her missing mother and siblings in Taliban-era Afghanistan. Needless to say, Parvana's Journey is a grim story. The cruelty of war is always in the background and it often violently encroaches upon the innocent lives of the young protagonists. Even at the very end, when some of the challenges are overcome, Deborah Ellis insists on an ending that is provisional at best. She suggests that children cannot easily escape the grasp of violence, hopelessness, and suffering that surrounds them.

Why did I decide to have my students read this novel?

• Children today hear about war and violence all the time and yet, when we take the time to listen to how much they know, it turns out that their knowledge is fragmented. I'm hoping to give them opportunities to change that.

• I believe that it's important to help raise awareness of what is happening right now around the world. Those of us who live in the affluent and sheltered North American suburbia need to be aware of what life is like elsewhere.

• The media coverage of military conflicts around the world that my students are most likely to watch (the six o'clock newscast, for example) is often superficial. It reduces complex situations to laughably simplistic accounts. Children need to know that there is complexity behind these seemingly straightforward reports. I want to give my students opportunities to discover the human dimensions of these stories.

• I also want to give them opportunities to learn how media texts are constructed, especially texts about controversial issues.

A couple of weeks ago, when I first decided to use this novel, I found myself thinking "How do I structure this unit? How do I present these difficult topics to my students?" Seemingly, they are very innocent questions. I soon realized, however, that they weren't really that innocent.

Do they not suggest that I want to present my students with a pre-defined unit? Do they not suggest that I see myself as the only architect of what we are about to study? Do they not show that I perceive myself as a content expert looking for the best way to peddle that content? I think they do.

It's fascinating to me that after three years of blogging with my students, my first instinct quite often is still to pre-package the content for them, especially if the content is new. As soon as I finished reading this novel a couple of months ago, my first instinct was to structure, organize, and plan. I also caught myself using the word "unit" as if the experience of reading and discussing literature could ever be that neatly packaged. What's worse, I attempted to carefully pre-package it for my students. For some mysterious reason, this kind of practice is deeply ingrained and I often find it difficult to abandon it. Is it because I hear these terms everyday from many of my colleagues? Is it because teaching is often reduced to neatly organized subjects and schedules?

Whatever the reason, I have decided to adopt a different strategy. After years of teaching and learning within a class blogosphere, I have learned to observe myself as a teacher, I have learned to reflect on my practice. So, when I realized that my first instinct was to pre-package learning for my students, I knew that I needed to stop and re-think my initial ideas. Instead of trying to figure out how to structure this term, I have decided to open it up to my students. I am not going to plan expectations and outcomes. I am not going to carefully organize all the learning that is about to take place. If I do, chances are there won't be too much learning in my classroom this spring. Instead of planning every activity and structuring every lesson, I want to focus on ensuring that my classroom is filled with opportunities for engagement. I want us to have conversations. I want my students to use this novel as a springboard that can lead to topics that they can truly engage with.

On my desk right now is a large pad of paper. In the centre, I wrote: "How Do I Begin?" The most important part of this process, it seems to me, is learning how to pique their interest, how to motivate them to keep reading and learning, and how to ensure that our discussions of Parvana's Journey emerge from student interactions with and about this text, and are not given to them as a pre-packaged set of handouts.

I don't know yet exactly how to begin, but I know that I will use the first couple of lessons to listen.

• I want to listen to them as they discuss the cover

• I want to listen to their first reactions when they come into the classroom having read the first few chapters.

• I want to listen as they talk about their views on war, violence, and suffering - concepts that they are fortunate enough not to have experienced.

• I want to listen as they talk about burqas or chadors, for example, ... and how they relate them to the familiar world of their everyday lives.

• I want to see what happens when I point out to them one tiny sentence on the back cover - "All royalties from the sale of this book will go to Women for Women, an organization that helps women in Afghanistan."

Then, we'll talk ... about whatever emerges, about what we need to learn, and about how to start. And then, we'll see, we'll see where these conversations take us.