EDUC 393 Cross-curricular Reflexive Writing #1

Phew, where do I begin?!?!  My brain has been buzzing with so many different thoughts, queries, and questions during these initial few weeks!  Actually, if I am being reflexive, reflective, and completely honest, it has been buzzing around thoughts, queries, and questions pertaining to teaching and education for the past few years!  Coming to the University of British Columbia’s School of Education after two years of experience as an uncertified teacher teaching on call (TTOC), I feel ready to embark on this journey of knowledge, experiential learning, and growth, but I also have many concerns about the role of the teacher and the context of teaching in our rapidly changing world. 

I am not implying that teachers, and the teaching profession before me, did not experience change.  However, in the most recent era of expanded globalization, unparalleled technological advancement, the explosion of knowledge, and the blowup of social/digital media, how we teach, what we teach, why we teach, where we teach, and how our students learn and cope with the how, what, why, and the where of our teaching, has changed dramatically.  Teachers are expected to adapt at an ever-increasing rate of speed in order to keep apace.  My concern, in line with Sir Ken Robinson’s (2010) concerns, lies in our ability as teachers to keep up to such changes when the education paradigms put in place around us are not adapting.

Robinson (2010) argues that we are failing our students because the current education paradigm is trying to meet the future needs of educating children by doing what we did in the past.  As such, it is alienating millions of kids who do not see the point of going to school.  This is a very sad reality, which I have seen play out in the classrooms I have taught, especially in the intermediate, junior, and high school grades.  Robinson calls for a complete shift, a total revamp, of the educational paradigm—one that moves away from conformity and standardization and toward creativity, divergent thinking, and collaboration.  According to Robinson, this paradigm shift must rethink human capacity and change the structures and habits of our educational institutions and the habitats they occupy.  Robinson posits some very important questions that I think can guide our future work as teachers.  The first, economic, asking us to question how we educate our children to take their places in the economies of the twenty-first century when we cannot anticipate what the economy will look like in this always changing, advancing world.  The second, cultural, asking us to question how we educate children to help them better understand and value their cultural identity while we are in the turmoil of globalization. 

Did I think about these issues, concerns and daunting questions when I was in my youth?  Thank goodness, no!!  Was it because public education in my youth, and my teachers within it, were without flaws?  Again, no.  Yet, when I was a student, I do not remember seeing the extent of challenges in public education, in my school buildings, or in my classrooms, that I see today.  Part of this, no doubt, has to do with my lens.  As a student, I was looking through the lens of child.  As a teacher, I am looking through the lens of an educator, concerned with meeting the needs of her diverse students.  As a mother, I am looking through the lens of a parent, concerned for her children’s education.  Still, lenses aside, I am willing to bet that if I could send a classroom of today’s students back in time 25 years, so that they were sitting in one of my elementary or secondary classrooms, they would agree that challenges have grown significantly.

The question becomes: is all hope lost?  Ben Johnson (2009), argues that, although it is complicated, there are “beacons of hope”—beacons that understand that it is not what is learned, but how it is learned; beacons that understand that a teacher is no longer a “purveyor of knowledge” but a “learning leader”; that the classroom and it’s learners should not be compartmentalized, but rather be “transformed into a high-performance learning team” (p. 2).  Johnson argues, “long past are the days where teachers could be effective by themselves”; adding that, “[t]he survival of public education will ultimately be determined by the extent to which teachers embrace peer collaboration in planning and implementing high-performance learning teams”; and finally, that “teachers must honor and value the time that students spend in our classrooms by devoting the majority of it to the only real teaching that has a chance of keeping up with the ever expanding volume of knowledge” (p. 3).  As teachers, we need to give students the tools they need to be successful, we need to help them understand the processes of learning, and we need to give them a solid foundation in the essentials of literacy, numeracy, and both community and digital citizenry.

Given that I am here today, as a Teacher Candidate with the goal of teaching as a certified teacher in my hometown community of Quesnel, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Lhatko Dene First Nation, shows my hope is not lost!  I have faith in teachers, the teaching profession, and public education.  I believe that educational paradigms can shift and I am confident that the Bachelor of Education program will prepare me for being a part of that shift.  I endeavor to take any and all challenges of teaching in stride.  I want to support students and ensure that public education and my teaching is accessible, that it is relevant, and that it adapts to keep pace with our ever-changing world.  The moment I stop believing that it, and I, can be these things or, more importantly, when our students stop believing it, is the moment we—as a society—will find ourselves in trouble.  The day our education system fails our youth is the day we fail as a society!  It is up to us, as teachers in the teaching profession, to ensure this does not happen.

References

Johnson, Ben. (2009, November 19).  Why Do We Teach?  edutopia.  Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/teacher-role-redefined

Robinson, Ken. (2010, October 14).  RSA ANIMATE.  Changing Education Paradigms. [Video] YouTube.  Uploaded on September 14, 2021 from https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U