The Balancing Act

We have all heard that being a teacher is not just being someone who educates learners, but is rather also a mother/father, a psychologist, a paramedic, an entertainer - a superhero.. basically.

As an educator there are so many aspects to take into consideration apart from just the content of your lesson. You are busy working with a blank canvas, with every lesson being a stroke of paint, which in the end will hopefully develop into a beautiful and completed painting to be exposed to the public. But how does one balance being EVERYTHING that a teacher is (or should be), and still manage to actually TEACH?

Foley, in the video Effective Pedagogy: Teaching a whole child, mentions key aspects needed to teach a whole child.

Shannon refers to pastoral care, effective teaching practices in the class environment and the necessary resources needed.

Pastoral care, to me, forms the basis of all the above. To encourage and develop positive attitudes and relationships as well as focusing on the well-being of both the teacher and the learner, the school and its body is bound to flourish. Of course effective teaching practices are also of great need as well as the necessary resources to ensure effectiveness - as can be seen in Abby Wills' classroom.

By making a very simple yet creative change within the classroom, she found a way to engage the learners. Through this engagement she did not only experience better participation, but also a new type of relationship developed within this environment. The children were not only willing, but eager to form part of the creativity and fun and through this an environment of positive attitudes and excitement grew.

By taking the above into consideration, I thus agree with Shannon Foley in terms of the necessary aspects needed to teach a whole child. It is not just about standing in front of a class and pouring knowledge into them - it really is all about the holistic approach of a role model, a psychologist, a paramedic, an entertainer, and finally an educator. It's about the balancing act.

Vice Versa: Teacher-Students & Student-Teachers

In his article, The Standards of Critical Digital Pedagogy, Sam Hamilton explains how conventional educational standards are limiting potential learning environments.

He raises an interesting point when referring to Paulo Freire:

 As Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction” (72). Freire then unsettles the teacher/student binary, casting classroom occupants as teacher-students and student-teachers. This recasting of students’ and teachers’ subject positions does more than merely suggest teachers have plenty to learn and students have plenty to teach; it’s an early step in moving both students and teachers toward a critical consciousness of their position and possibilities in an oppressive system of education; both teachers and students are confined by their defined roles, limited to be either bankers making knowledge deposits or empty bank vaults passively receiving those deposits. It effectively explodes the most immediate and oppressive power dynamic with which students and teachers are aware: namely, the dynamic between teachers and students as teachers and students.

This argument takes me back to a previous blog post in which I argued that learning in a 21st century cannot be successful with a system that dates back to when this technologically-driven generation's parents were in school. The idea then to create a new balance of student-teachers and teacher-students and disrupting the age-old, standardised power balance within the classroom makes perfect sense.

Allowing learning to take place within a technologically mediated self-directed distance allows for new ways as well as unique ways of learning. These ways of learning of course not only referring to textbooks and teachers, but media and technologically related materials as well as peers and social influences. This way of learning allows the flow of ideas and practices to be shared, experienced, tried and tested. Throughout my own school years I have come across many individuals who are not able to take in and understand information through the specific way it is presented - a common problem in the standard schooling system. This new suggested way of schooling is the perfect way to solve this specific problem and is clear in the workings of The Independent Project.

As argued before, I believe it is of utmost importance to allow a new generation to learn through the media that is already so deeply integrated within their daily lives. Now, why not allow them to teach the old, standard education system a thing or two?