TEACHING, LEARNING, KNOWING: ALWAYS BECOMING A TEACHER

Musings of a dark overlord: Leveraging 21st-century education with open sourceCreated by Libby Levi for opensource.com

I know.

I know what I know.

The question is how.

My niece is beginning her first year as an intervention specialist in the district from which I retired.

What does she know and how did she come to know?
How will she come to know more and/or differently?

As we enter the teaching landscape, we enter ongoing conversations.

Conversations about the nature of teaching, the qualities of great teaching, the role of education in our lives as learners, as teachers-- conversations that identify and name what we do.

Conversations that attempt to explain how we do what we do and why.  Conversations about how we came to be the people who do what we do.  Ongoing conversations

For more about the ongoing conversations and the changing nature of our participation in those conversations, see these previous blog posts:

• Teachers as Intellectuals: Entering the Conversation.

• I used to think... But now I think

How do we archive what we know, have experienced, and remember?

And who interprets the validity of the same?

As teachers, we enter the classrooms, as composites of all we have seen, heard, experienced, learned, and read.

These words, retweeted, shared and quoted on a number of social media sites capture this notion:

"You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner.
You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day, so drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colours fill your mind." -Jac Vanek

Sometimes our personal curriculum collage -our individual hodge-podge of learning--the how we came to know what we know-- conflicts with how others think we should have learned.

Burkins and Yaris illustrate this as they discuss how Scout learned to read and write in To Kill a Mockingbird:

In chapter 2 of To Kill a Mockingbird–a classic text, ...–Scout begins first grade and meets Miss Caroline who “accuses” her of being taught to learn to read at home and tells her to tell her father to stop teaching her lest it “interfere with her reading.” Scout is appalled by Miss Caroline’s suggestion that her father “taught” her anything and begins to think back on how she began to read.  To add further insult to injury, Miss Caroline also discovers that Scout can write–in cursive–a skill that she learned from her housekeeper, Calpurnia.  Scout quickly learns from Miss Caroline that “we don’t write in first grade, we print. You won’t learn to write until you’re in the third grade.”

Burkins and Yaris go on to urge teachers to listen to their students and meet them for learning/teaching where they are rather than where the curriculum dictates.

What do our early experiences look like when we pull them out of our past to examine in our present?

What if we learn new names and theories for what we have experienced and had named otherwise earlier? Does that change the original experience?

We encounter ideas, concepts and theories as we learn, as we teach--- we are always becoming ourselves.  We are always becoming teachers.

We are a constantly changing amalgam of all we have consciously chosen to accept and make our own, to revise, to renegotiate, or to reject altogether.

Cochran-Smith and Lytle conceptualize teacher knowledge in three ways that may be helpful here.

• Knowledge for Practice is that formal knowledge generated by researchers, the big thinking that becomes theories of teaching and learning.  What have researchers and theorists said?

• Knowledge in Practice is that practical knowledge resulting from our time, experience, and  reflection in our own classrooms.   What have I learned as I have taught and reflected on that experience?

• Knowledge of Practice is that learning we gain from intentional inquiry into our own classrooms, our own practice, our own thinking.  Our own classrooms become sites of interrogation and investigation. What are the implications and applications of my knowledge and practice? How can I build on my own thinking? What new thinking can I generate from the body of theories that other researchers have generated?  How can I interrogate all of this?

 For more from Cochran-Smith and Lytle  on these three kinds of knowledge see:
 Chapter 8: Relationships of Knowledge and Practice: Teacher Learning in Communities
 REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN EDUCATION January 1999 vol. 24 no. 1 249-305

As we continue to think about how we gain or "grow" knowledge, we have to consider what takes place as we encounter new concepts, ideas, and theories

Sometimes we find exactly what we are seeking---- or what we did not know we were seeking-- and our knowledge and experiences are affirmed.

Other times we know in our soul, but have not or cannot articulate what we know until we encounter  a particular person, book, idea or theory.

Often times we encounter ideas that challenge us, conflict with our current thinking, and create dissonance.

It is these times when we most have the opportunity to transform our thinking, to witness a revelation ... or ultimately to reject the ideas.

Which theories explain your understanding of learning, in your own classroom, in your own head.... and in life?  Have your theories changed?    What do you  know?  How do you know?

 Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

What are you current learning/teaching theories?  How did you come to develop these theories? How have they changed over time?

Write an essay explaining to a new teacher what you believe about teaching and learning.

How can you apply Cochran-Smith"s and Lytle's  conceptualization of knowledge to life in general?

Write a poem identifying ways you know what you know.

What does it mean to be always becoming? Explore this concept in a personal essay.

WRITING, BEING, AND BECOMING

Are we what we write?

Do we become what we write?

This notion had arisen in my reading and conversations several times lately.

I know that I write sometimes to discover what I think. Does that, in turn, determine who I am and who I become? 

Exploring life's unfolding in writing is a treasured treatment for what ails us,  a magic code ring for what puzzles us,  and a refuge from that which would otherwise, perhaps, defeat us.

In my Teacher Leadership in Teaching  Digital Writing  Class with Troy Hicks and several Columbus Area Writing Project teachers this past Sunday evening, the question arose, As we write or contribute and participate online, are we creating ourselves? Are we creating new identities?  Several of us who blog then wondered Who are we as bloggers? Does the writing change us?

According to G. Lynn Nelson in the introduction  to his book Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives Through the Power of Language, "writing is a tool for intellectual, psycological, and spiritual growth."  He goes on to say that we cannot,"study language and writing in isolation, apart from the people who speak and write, and apart  from what happens when people speak and write. Apart from our being."

"Every person is born into a life as a blank page--and every person leaves life as a full book...we ..weave life events into narrative and interpret  everything that happens through the veil of the story.", says 
Christina Baldwin in the preface to Storycatcher: Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story.

So maybe in a sense we do, indeed, write ourselves, our stories and our relationships into being.

I am currently reading and thoroughly enjoying a rather uniquely written dissertation, Seeing Red-- A Pedagogy of Parallax: An Estolary Bildungsroman on Artful Scholarly Inquiry by Pauline Sameshima. In this epistolary novel, doctoral student Julia,  writes letters, sometimes subtly steamy, to her advisor, Red. Woven into those letters, are also her theories and research about teacher education, as well as the mosaics she creates, and bits about her life outside of her studies.

One concept explored throughout Julia's letters is that she believes she is being created as she creates.  At one point the she writes:

As we perform, paint, write music or poetry or fiction, we are conveying complex ideas and often these ideas are the complex parts of ourselves we are coming to understand as we are creating.

Julia also wonders how personal identity influences who we are as teachers, and also, on a separate note, if the growing love she feels for her advisor is created as they write back and forth. (We only read her letters not his.  We can only infer his responses.) 

So I wonder then --Did Anne  Frank become the Anne Frank that we know, as she wrote her teenage entries in her diary, as she explored her relationships with her sister Margot,  as she fantasized about  boys, as she negotiated life with her parents and her small  world in the attic-- and the larger world in her head?

Did Anais Nin create herself in her diary?  Did Sylvia Plath write Sylvia Plath into being through  her journals and other writings?

I took this question into my own past notebooks and journals--Did I create myself as I wrote?

I have always named each volume in which I write.  It seems even the names signify  a creating of a specific self in a specific time.

.

From my 1981  journal:

 ....I begin a new book and renew life...many things were not present when I arrived at the beginning of the previous volume, Collages....saw fragments in my life.. Piece by piece the fragments are falling into position to form  a complete--a new Lifeframe.  

Did I write into being  a more complete self?

An excerpt from  the opening  entry of the 2003 volume, Ancient Paths, in which I was recounting lessons from Returning, the previous volume, :

First of alI, I have begun to learn and experience the secret of contentment and the joy that can not be taken away... ..the older I get --the less time I am willing to waste on petty, trivial and unnecessary drama, disruption and disorder.

Did I write myself to a greater contentment?

From my current volume, Deeper Writing,

Sometimes poetic phrases  are written as healing balms, providing space to say the things we all want to say;at other times, the reader is simply being led through the landscape of Everywoman's life; at still other moments they are meant to serve as maps for discovery of hidden treasure, windows into the inner heart, and all else that we can't discern with our eyes alone.

Did I/ Do I write myself into new understandings?  

Do I write myself into being? 

Do we create ourselves as we write?

Do we become what we write?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibility

Today try freewriting about yourself for 10 minutes.

Begin to  simply write without a preconceived notion about where the writing will go or what you intend to say. This writing can take any form that emerges.

Who are you in this writing?
Who did you "become" in the writing?