The next assignment

I want my blog to flow in every direction. I feel that what I wanted to say about the nature of the pedagogy used in Aditi wasn't said well enough by me because I haven't yet reflected deeply enough on it. WhatI want to say can be started this way. About four years ago I started a re-learning process regarding the use of the computer. My colleagues were using blackboard and chalk and handouts of notes that were photostatted. I felt the need update myself on what was happening in the world of technology so that I could think about how to use it in present day education. So I hit the net! It was an electrifying experience. Without being aware of what others around the world were doing I surfed freely and found out the myriad possibilities of the world wide web. Starting from the most commonly used interfaces of communication like email and its variations to really complex possibilities of expression and communication available on the net, I ranged freely around its bourne enjoying everything there. It had a fallout effect in the sense that I suddenly felt a gap between me and my colleagues becasue I wanted to bring in this technology into the classroom and they were petrified by understandable fears like are we too old to learn it , it's just a new-fangled innovation etc. Kerala has good , even excellent, teachers but their methodology is outmoded. I belong to that background. So when I came here to Aditi and Tara Kini's classes went on, my mind exploded with the same re-cognition that had happened to me when I started serious surfing for new ways to transfer information etc.
I realised that a teaching revolution had occurred in the world that I was not part of, that I knew nothing about. At the same time I felt at ease in the new dispensation because the thoughts were all familiar to me as my thoughts on teaching while I had sat alone and thought on these things in Trivandrum. What I had thought of they were already doing and had been doing for years here. The thought was both humbling and exciting. When I started blogging one of the first things that came to me back in TVM was how blogging could help my P.G students and what a pity it was I couldn't make them do it because of financial constraints. So when I came here and got the opportunity to start my own blog it was both self-confirming and exhilarating.
To come to the main point. I am now interested i ntrying to delineate for myself what this system of pedagogy is all about. What is the underlying philosophy? Constructivism? I have started reading Anita Rampal's essay on the Science curriculum and it has a good definition of constructivism in it. Piaget and cognitive psychologists are involved , yes, I know. Modern experiments in pedagogy are implicated too. But what is the structure?
In the next blog I hope to put in Anita Rampal's defintion of constructivism. I am reading the four essays and deciding which one to choose for my next assignment.
I want to write something clear, simple and fresh without compromising on the guidelines given.
Maybe I could start with a definition of education? I think I will use Tagore and Jesus a lot. Not sure. This is good , the mental cogs have started spinning -----
And thanks a lot, all of you for leaving such encouraging comments for me to read on the blog .
I want to acknowledge here that all of you have taught me more than you think and I can hope to give back.

I thought I'll reflect a bit on what has happened to me after coming to Aditi. First came the Mapping/ Evolving Professional Practice Course which was a real good orientation programme and helped induct me into the school system and aslo to the idea that we are professionals and need to know about pedagogy. I am learning. as a result of that course, to write tight lesson plans and have aslo learned how to write annual plans and unit plans. I also met wonderful teachers, primarily Tara Kini, Shuchi, Arundhati Raja, my seven "new" colleagues whom I really admire and many others like Nalini, Jyotsna,Satish, Aruna, Suravi, Anjana, Sneha, Vandana, Kalpana - too many to name in fact. I picked up many new techniques like mind mapping procedures, using planners and organisers etc. A video I watched on how to use time in Blocks was really entertaining and instructive. Moving forward into actual practice after that was therefore not so daunting . But I soon found out that theory and practice are two different things. I wanted to go in with the Learning is Fun approach. But my kids soon clipped my wings. They were more into exams and grades!!! I was a bit surprised I must admit. It used to be a little different in my days, if I remember correctly. Our problem with our teachers was that we thought they were too exams and marks centred and never seemed to realise that there were skills and attitudes outside the syllabus that were as relevant as what we were doing "in class." I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. anyway, always! Then came the PPSE course. Its use of web tools and the six hats exercise plus Tara's content-context mindbender and GN's inspirational talk on teaching with its unforgettable diagram , the essays and assignments given to us so far for reading and doing have all made a deep impact on me. Surprisingly the effect has been one of awakening to a fierce sense of competition in me. I find that I want to be the best and get a string of AAAAAA's !!!!!! As a teacher and a student. Facilitator, pedagogue, professional practitioner , educator - whatever word we use - guide, guru, mentor, friend and philosopher - I suddenly feel once again the drive I had when I was a research student. "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,/ To follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the uttermost bound of human thought" to echo Tennyson's Ulysses's famous lines. Meanwhile i've also come across a simple fact -teachers out here in Aditi are definitely much better than where I come from ( and that includes me) and I need to be aware of this and learn from them before launching out on finding my own style of teaching as for as education in schools is concerned. I now want to read the essays by Anita Rampal and the other essays given to me by Tara and also read stuff by Gandhi, Krishnamurthy (J.K.), Tagore and also take a look at Paulo Freire and Ivan Illyich. Pedagogy of the Opressed and Deschooling Society are two books I always wanted to read but never got around to. Maybe now I can. I have started on Krishnamurthy's Education and the Significance of Life. It is slow going. But in the end it will be rewarding, I have no doubt about that.

The threaded discussion board was a good experience, as was writng down my timeline. In the company of people with deep, wide and varied experiences like Amarnathan sir, Srinivasan, Maheshwaran , Bala, Raji , Sandra, Gudrun, Geeta, Parbati, Joel, Gulab, Neela, Anu,Vijaya, Uday and indeed all my colleagues who form the 21 who are now taking the PPSE course plus new professional friends I'm making like Beena Babu and Vasu sir etc. - too many names and not enough names !!!! - so don't mind if i didn't mention your name - I am blossoming.

So there is generally a good feel regarding my profession in me these days. Let's see where all this goes. The tough thing is to be simple like Socrates could be in his dialogues and compassionate like Buddha or pure like Jesus in one's relationship with one's students while also being explosive in triggering of learning and interest and potential in them like some post-modern thinkers have made me explode in the realm of literary and critical theory............

The voyage is heady , anyway........... :)

Snippets

I've fiinished the basic minimum requirement for the assignments.
So taking a break . Time for some lighter moments.

A nice site to visit

Internet Humour:
The Great Game
The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa.
Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight.
You won.
You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language. They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine. They'll never understand it.

I think I'm a programmer!!!!!

The picture is from the Lord of the Rings scrapbook , look closely at the background ,you'll love the detailing. (http://img-nex.theonering.net/images/scrapbook/orig/12631_orig.jpg)

Aditi - the present.

So we come to the last phase - Juggling as a metaphor for teaching - personal commitments - school and teaching/learning processes - finding the answer to problems and solutions. Suddenly I am a learner once again.

I find a most interesting development occurring. My learning skills have suddenly blossomed again but it seems to be affecting my teaching skills............ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I know it's temporary.

I love this uncertainty. Challenge. How to come out on top of this and every other new challenge that's ever gonna be thrown at me by life as its way of getting me to excel.

The game is for winning. As is the dame:) LOL.

End of timeline exercise. Summing up.
1985- 1993: teaching my friends in college unofficially
1993: teaching as a researcher
1994-1995: teaching in tutorial colleges
1995 - 2005: teaching in a Private, Govt. aided, NAAC accredited college under Kerala Univ.
1995-2005: Teaching as resource person for refresher courses for teachers and also conducting vivas for P.G students, guiding research projects officially and 'unofficially' for P.G. and M.Phil.

To sum up: Contexts are fluid, whichever way you look at it but content in the case of working with prescribed syllabuses is more or less fixed. The battle I'm now into is how to master the new demand of the context of teaching plus two students and high school students in a way palatable to them so that they pass the exam and get good grades etc without compromising on my inner drive to awaken them to see that there is something more to learning than basics like getting through an exam or getting good grades. In brief the content should be how they can be inspired to ask the "right" questions and find creative, original, innovative and deep solutions . And the context: Well , they need to know that there are concentric circles of contexts and each matters in its own way. The teacher has to creat contexts and not just know them.


Colour coding used: blue for theorizing, red for quotes and white for reminiscing.

News: I have started my first educational blog. Wish me luck!!!

The college phase -II

I think I'll use the stream of consciousness technique to write more about it. Or just move on? There, I've already started stream of consciousnessing..... lol..... P.D.C> prepare them to take the exams seriously.... degree classes..... more interesting.... P.G. oh man, I love that game.... invigilation.... correcting answer scripts equals tonnes of paper work in Kerala Univ. ..... attendance, discipline, lack of facilities, finance and infrastructure, genral stagnation of standards, the kids leave, the game goes on and semseterization equals one step forward and three steps sidewards.
assignments, seminars and projects plus internal assessments
a blur a whilrlwind viva voces and finally the realization
I like teaching the p.g. students most. I like teaching Litt rather than General English. Varying my grasp and reach. More and more content. Innovating in methods of teaching. But somehow stagnating. God, am I beginning to hate teaching?
Then two things happened, no, three, that changed everything.
I learned how to use the computer and surf the internet big time. BANG. Something exploded in me. The future is here and now and it includes me.
My son was diagnosed as seemingly autistic.
All my career dreams go up in smoke. Promotion due :)
I begin writing academic stuff again after a long lay off.
Writing poems too.
I need to learn to teach so that I can help my son learn. So I need to learn. LEARN.
My life turned topsy turvy. I had just begun to make it. I was becoming known locally and my articles began appearing and I had definitely taken a step forward because the Kerala university began to call me to be the resource person for their refresher courses.
Teaching teachers.
What a pleasure.
I gave it all up or lost it all. For something better.
Next episode: Aditi and learning/starting from from scratch. Coming soon to this blog near yours.

The college phase

Mahesh has defined acontextual learning in his entry as becoming aware of the tremendous possibilty that anything and everything around us - in short, nothing short of everything is useful for and can be used in classroom and teaching practice. All is context. Except content :)

In my official college life, Govt. appointed, I started by teaching General English in Pre-degree, the equivalent of our + 2 ISC , and General English in B.A. and B.Sc. I also taught literature for B.A. and M.A. It was because of my doctoral degree that I was instantly given the chance to teach at not just the Degree level but the Post-graduate level too. I taught John Bunyan and Samuel Beckett the first year to the P.G's. Many of the new teachers in my Dept. had come from my alma mater for my own P.G and research years , so we had a good thing going in terms of rapport in the Department. Some of us tried an experiment which failed but helped all of us in the long run. It was to start a course in trying to prepare the stidents to write the UGC exam so that they could get fellowships to do M.Phil or Ph.D if they wanted to. We had to wind it up after a few months because the students thought our standards too demanding. But it gave us newcomers the push to not slacken in terms of the quality we were used to in the place we had come from. to stick to being at the cutting edge of knowledge in our field, I mean. We loved the tag of specialists!
I would divide my time in the college into three phases
a.When the Pre-Degree was there
b.After they stopped Pre-Degree classes
&
c.Semesterization of P.G. with introduction of seminars, assignments, student projects and internal assessments.

Continuing the timeline of my teaching career

The first three phases I spoke of dealt with a span of time that started , say, in eighth , ninth and tenth standards when I began participating in combined study sessions and ended in 1995 with my last job which lasted only a month or so in another parallel college , called Our College, before I moved on/in to the official space of a Govt.appointed University junior lecturer in a private-Govt.aided UGC approved, NAAC accredited Catholic-run college in Kerala.
I had finshed my research and even as I kept teaching in Arts College for Women I was applying for official jobs. I went for a series of interviews. My results hadn't come out so I was not yet an official Ph.D holder. The moment my viva got over in Madras/Chennai, conducted by one of my thesis-examiners who was now living a retired life as a Professor Emeritus I knew change was coming. I finally got through the first interview I attended after getting my degree officially, in Fatima Mata National College, Quilon. When I got the news I quit my job in Alwaye and went back home to Trivandrum. The job would start in June and it was just March. So in the interim period I taught briefly in Our College,Trivandrum. The class was thatched!The students who came there were those who had failed in the pre-degree exams and the degree exams in the first attempt. Failure had given them a sad look and they were humble and broken. They were also eager to learn. What they wanted was notes. lots of it. I felt sorry for them and wondered why the education system produced so many failures. When I moved out from there after doing my usual stuff of reading texts line by line and annotating it etc. and giving them cyclostyled notes that were given to me free by the tutorial college that weren't of very good standard I noted half humorously and half wryly that my literary guru Nakulan, a great Tamil modernist writer, was indeed right when he wrote this poem:
What is English Literature?
Annotations
Essays
And short questions.

This timeline is personal and also connected to content and context.

In post-modernism , the words content and context are problematised. Context is considered equal or more important than content. The two are separable, inseparable , one and need to be theorised upon. For instance, every lesson has not context but contexts. The jargon includes two other relevant words, frame and background. If content is text , in literary theory, inter-disciplinarity asks what is foregrounded , using the language of painting and structuralism and also what the frame is using the language of art (and; my aside: detective language?!) .The point is there are too many contexts and frames and backgrounds around which text, picture or content can be read,drawn, hung, contoured....
In teaching, for instance, in the four examples I already gave I portrayed four different contexts and I could multiply them indefinitely. The contexts were students teaching, researcher teaching, teaching girls and teaching "failures". That is a very simplistic way of putting it.
Plurality of contexts is inescapable and alters the content into a multi-pronged thing.
How does this reflect on teaching practice? Shall we fall into one of the two extremes of post-modernism which says there is no context(s) or traditional teaching which posits only content. Or is there a third and even a fourth possiblilty. Mahesh's a-contextual learning comes to mind. So too do modern and ancient experiments in pedagogy where the contexts were decidee by various factors and allowed for multiplicity in a limited way so that the educational system wouldn't slip over into anarchy.
I need to give examples. In theIndian context, the post-modern kind of education would be the one enjoyed by intelligent dropouts who come from well to do families. The traditional kind is seen all around in ordinary schools and colleges. Content is all important there. In a school like Rishi Valley or in an experimental university like Vishwa Bharathi that is trying to incorporate modern/ancient Indian methods of pedagogy the contexts are often limited to national,local,regional although this involves a certain amount of broadening to multiple "contexts" without putting too much pressure on the system so that it won't collapse from the burden of one too many contexts.
Schools like MAIS work on a different orientation , because it brings in the international context and foregrounds it above the local and regional contexts, placing it on the same footing as the national context.
The teacher-facilitator who is a cog in all these machines has to reflect on how these shifting contexts impinge on his work. The main thing could be summed up in one or two words : nowadays, he has to be adaptible, highly versatile and flexible - to survive successfully in such environments , especially since technology has come in with an information highway that almost makes him obsolete with the amount of facts it provides. Should we perpetuate the myth that learning is not possible without gurus? Or find alternatives, the things we can now do in the new situation.

As for a-contextual learning I have lots to say about it and I will in one of my next posts.

We live in exciting days as far as teaching as professional practice is concerned.

Time lines.....what?!!

First timeline.....
What happened in the second half of the PPSE course -
We analysed Krishna Kumar's article. We started on the threaded discussion boards
We discussed future assignments. Worked on the second day on our assignment of how to contextualise content that slips away from content and it was an awesome team effort by Bala, Anitha, Raji, Hema and yours truly. We got an A. Yay!!!!

Timeline of teaching-learning practice , as an amateur and professional.

My first amteurish attempt at teaching was explaining to friends the meanings of poems, because of my feel for Literature. We used to call it combined or group study, not "collaborative learning," in those days.

My first interesting teaching assignment was at the Institute of English, Keral Univ., while I was doing my research on Samuel Beckett. I had to teach Waiting for Godot to the post-graduates at the behest of my guide who also happened to be the HOD. It went off well ,to my pleasant surprise! I was teaching my juniors!!!

Then I taught for eleven months in Arts College for Women , Alwaye, a private tutorial(parallel) college. I had to teach general English in pre-degree classes and English literature and language in B.A. and M.A. classes. The context was interesting. My students insisted on speaking Malayalam with a kind of rustic and beautiful twang to it. Many were from the middle, lower middle and poorer classes in terms of economics. Quite a few were Muslims and came to class veiled and sometimes in black. They were all girls., of course :)
Their knowledge of English was suspect.
I had to read texts to them line by line, annotate everything, write the notes myself and make them copy it out by hand as I dictated it in class.
This kind of work ensured I knew the text well, but they "mugged up "everything. They were very respectful and loving but in class they had to be kept totally in control. A must was that they had to somehow pass. Institutions like that depend on results because the next batches come around based on advertisements or word of mouth or hearsay and failure meant closure of the institution. But , in spite of whatever drawbacks were there, I enjoyed my work thoroughly and became very popular with "my" girls. Most of them passed and some of them went on to B.Ed and should be even teaching now. One of them, a very sincere girl called Sindhu, who liked me a lot and did her work with all her heart got in as a teacher there after I left. That, I felt, was a feather in my cap.
At the time I knew nothing about pedagogy, except self-taught thumb rules. I couldn't use my "heavy" knowledge in a place like that but had to keep it simple. That was the main rule , keep it simple, discipline be maintained , content be made clear and keeping the context in mind teach from the exam point of view and encourage rote learning after analysing the question papers for them and trying to predict which questions would come :).
Though I was paid what by my present standards is a pittance , needless to say I was happy in my first teaching job. It was the satisfaction I got from seeing these girls coming from slightly backward areas and backgrounds become interested in studying and literature and beginning to read and write in English somewhat fluently that made me quite happy. Their love and humility also touched me deeply. Even the ones who perhaps failed were not likely to blame the teacher, in places like that. Yes, all in all I still treasure that time lots. Can't measure it's value, it was a very significant time and made a big contribution to me inside.

testing putting in a link and uploading a pic.

http://www.ppsetarakini.blogspot.com

Shuchi's list in schoolblogs didn't have Tara's link so I've put it in here, temporarily.

To return to more serious stuff. it's all about time mangement and sriking a balance between content and context. Today's teacher is really in a position of great interest and significance because his/her job is becoming so challenging. The need to read in depth, document everything done, writing plans, preparation and writing and reflection, keeping abreast of information regarding exam systems etc. plus changes in one's areas of interest - the list can seem stressful but it's very easy if we concentrate on the instant - the present unit of time alone. So I feel. Multitasking is also not stressful when broken up into small units.