Slow Progress is still Progress

I guess that will have to be my mantra for now. I spent from  Friday to Sunday at the UWCSEA Multilingual Conference (#mlconf2015 if you want to follow the tweets – although not many people tweeting besides yours truly and a few others). Besides the fact that I was giving two sharing sessions, as you know it’s both a topic close to my heart and close to my digital essay theme! .... see more

Does academic equity even exist?

I've just finished reading through Yvette Slaughter's PhD thesis: The study of Asian languages in two Australian states: considerations for language-in-education policy and planning and what an eye-opener it was. And not for the reasons I thought it would be.

I'm really interested in language-learning ecology/(ies) and since hers mentioned this, I decided to take the plunge and wade through the 372 pages. And what I found was rather interesting. Aside from all the detailed analysis, the most interesting chapter was on  "Is Asian Language Study Equitable" - she has written a paper on it, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be easily accessible (i). (Just tried to find her on twitter to see where I can get a copy...).

And that's where I met my enthusiastic educational idealism face to face.  I am so naive. Yes I know all about the digital divide. I know that having a higher socio-economic status (or at least your parents) give all kinds of benefits such as extra-curricular, extra tutoring etc. But never would I have expected the vitriol around the supposed benefits Asian students have in studying Asian Languages. Even though I've experienced it first hand... does that sound absurd? In our HKU Chinese class we were separated between heritage and non-heritage learners (with Korean & Japanese bundled in with heritage due to their writing advantage), in fact, I switched to their class because I'd had a few years of stop start chinese classes and the mono-lingual anglo-saxon class was going a bit too slowly for me. And yes it was easier for them, but never once did I think it was not equitable. It just was. And I had to cope with it. And I just had to work a bit harder. A lot harder. But they were a nice bunch of people, and I'm still good friends with a few of them 7 years later.

There is so much background noise in the learning ecology that a rational person just would love to discount - however, it can seriously derail higher ideals. Looking at the example of our school. I really am a passionate champion for mother tongue. I'm a passionate champion for learning of languages in general, for everyone. But there are a lot of structural, emotional, financial and particularly attitudinal variables getting in the way of this ideal.

I have two children learning language at a native level, and they're two different languages, one we speak at home (Dutch) and the other was acquired in a dual language immersion program (Chinese). The attitude of my daughter when 2 native speakers joined her class this year? "At last! They've made the standard go up considerably, and they're showing up the laziness of the heritage kids and the weaknesses in the curriculum".  My response - nothing. If that's the way she felt, then I was fine with it. If she'd moaned and said it was unfair, I guess my response would have been that those kids were probably struggling in the rest of the subjects, so it was just as well they had a little respite from academic stress all week.
Maybe I've just been living in Asia for too long and have become one of those tiger mums. Or maybe language is important enough for me that I make sure the necessary time and effort goes into it.

Or maybe I don't care that much about grades. Ok, we're only in middle school in this household, and I'm not feeling the stress of university acceptance and IB results. I know for myself I do want to do well in my courses. But more importantly is how interesting, how relevant and how stimulating they are. Getting a good grade for largely arbitrary assignments (except the ones where I can choose the topic and have some lee-way to localise them - which so far at CSU has been most of them), is a side issue.   Ok, maybe I don't so much not care about grades as I'm ambivalent about the whole academic competition thing and putting a number on learning.  Except to indicate where you are in the learning / knowledge continuum for a particular subject.  I totally get homeschooling, and personalised learning, and entrepreneurial learning (except for the small but significant detail that I'm likely to commit infanticide should i ever have to educate my own brood). I hate putting kids of the same age in the same class - I love Seely Brown's Global one classroom thing -

For me the point of learning a language is to learn the language. Not to pass an exam. Not to get a diploma or certificate. To learn the language. To communicate. To access the culture. To pay homage to your own culture. To understand yourself and others. Anything else are pleasant externalities. I fear I may be in a small minority in this view.

I need to go and read some more. Leo van Lier's "Semiotics and ecology of language learning" awaits. Language is political. Who would have thought.

References:

Slaughter, Y. (2007). The study of Asian languages in two Australian states: considerations for language-in-education policy and planning. PhD thesis, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne.

Van Lier, L. (2004). The semiotics and ecology of language learning. Utbildning & demokrati, 13(3), 79-103.



(i) Slaughter, Y. (2005). Public perceptions of Asian languages in Australia. In May, S., Franken, M., & Barnard, R. (eds.), LED2003: Refereed Conference Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Language, Education and Diversity. Hamilton: Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, University of Waikato.

Deep research diving

I'm going to either become very quiet or very noisy in the next few weeks as I dive into my next research topic for my last (yikes, how fast did that go) assignment for INF530.

This is my research proposal:

===============================================

1. Proposal Topic

Language learning and the new digital information ecology

2. Proposed digital tools and/or spaces to be used

iBooks

This is a tool I've wanted to experiment with for a while, and I think it can be used to encompass all the multi-media affordances required for this essay. Eventually I'd like to expand on it and turn it into a resource for our students, educators and families.

3. Rationale

Previous research has indicated that successful language acquisition is the result of the combination of optimising factors relating to the child (student), family, school and community. These can be considered to operate in inter-relationships in a knowledge ecology. 

The affordances of digital technology in education combined with global connectedness allow unprecendented opportunities to leverage the connected learning principles of 

• production centered
• openly networked 
• shared purpose

within language learning, however the current structures of education may ignore or limit these opportunities due to institutional (or familial) fear, ignorance or perceived loss of control. 

This essay will look at the work of Seely, Hatie, Bawden, Ng, Siemans, Downes, Ford, Perrault etal. to examine learning design and the information environment and discuss how the learning systems and constituents allow for zones of intervention within the language learning ecology to leverage learning - sychronous and asynchronous, local and global and allow students and their families a greater locus of control over language learning. 

A particular focus will be mother tongue learning, an area often neglected by schools, who state they unable to justify supporting a large number of minority languages formally. I will argue this may be the result a failure of imagination and the application of digital technology and collaborative learning rather than a lack of resources.

===================================

So far I've been collecting some research and readings into (search terms - yes I do start with google scholar and then the university federated search and then the bibliography/citations of the articles I read that are worth while). My quest right now is to find the expert(s):

• "language learning ecology"
• "digital learning ecology"
• "digital language learning"
• "online language learning"

to mention a few, and I've come up with a wealth of articles and research studies. Seems I'm not the first to join the party here! (duh, as if). 

My ultimate goal is to create an iBook (of which this digital essay will be but a small 1,800 word part) geared to all the stakeholders in the language learning ecology of an international school (specifically the one I'm working at). 

So, a call out to everyone and anyone with useful leads for me to follow up (besides the 30 odd articles and one book - "Social networking for language education" I'll be digging into in the next week)

Unfair Advantage

Following the release of the results of our first assignment, there has been some soul searching and discussion on how better results can be attained and what went wrong etc. I’ve seen this on various Facebook groups I’m a member of too. I’ve referred earlier to the whole privilege thing, and I’ll say it again.  No one mentioned it, but of course some of us (myself included) had an unfair advantage. When I write “the whole privilege thing” and then so easily reference the exact article, it’s because I’ve read it, and stored it on Evernote, and can easily access it.... read more

Last night's Sichuan dinner in Chengdu - picking through the peppers!

Open, Social and Participatory? Who's driving the bus?

In this week’s module we were posed the following questions:

• How would curriculum change if our priority approach was on critical, creative, and collaborative thinking?

• What does the reality of the modern age of information– this age of Google –suggest that we “teach”?

• Can we simply “update” things as we go, or is it time for rethinking of our collective practice?

I was forwarded this very provocative article from the Atlantic by my boss this week = “The deconstruction of the K-12 teacher” It ties in quite nicely with the theme of this module, but it also turns the questions on their heads... 

Who is driving this bus? I get the feeling that many educators are feeling like passengers, some willingly paid for the ride, some were forced to embark, some think they’re the conductor or the ticket collector,  But who has set the itinerary, and is there a driver or is it a unmanned ground or cloud vehicle?

(Read more)

Chalk talk? inquiry? technology? what really matters?

In our #INF530 course we are exposed to a wide range of thoughts and ideas. Some Facebook groups, twitter feeds, paperli, google alerts yadayada throw even more at me.  One that is currently doing the rounds is whether chalk and talk is better than all this new fangled (from the 70's no less) participatory and inquiry learning stuff.  After all, look at the Chinese! Look at the Pisa results.

One of the most significant videos I have watched in the last few years was "The classroom experiment" I don't like learning through watching videos generally, as I can read way faster than I can watch and listen, so I get bored and distracted, so it's quite something when I say it really is worth two hours of your time.

In the last 7 years, my children and I have gone through various extremes of educations. They've had liberal PYP type inquiry learning, and chalk and talk rigorous structured learning with continuous high stakes assessment in the Chinese system.  I've spent 2 years full time studying Chinese at university and I've spent nearly 3 years doing two masters degrees by distance learning. 

I spend a lot of time talking to teachers and students and my own children, and reflecting on my own learning.

On Friday one of my teacher friends was telling me about the debriefing she'd had with her Grade 12 students on their final day of school before study weeks and exams.  She'd asked them what was really important in a teacher, in the classroom setting. What really mattered.  Was it inquiry, was it content, was it technology, was it the way the space was organised. Was it giving everyone a voice, was it content or thought or frequent testing or never testing or something inbetween?

Without fail she said, every single student said none of that really mattered. The only thing that really mattered was whether the teacher really cared about you and your learning or not.  Knowledge and passion for the subject came next.  And they then went to name teachers with widely different teaching philosophies and personalities that embodied that caring they were talking about.  And the fact that they really really wanted to work hard and succeed to show the teacher that the caring was mutual.

We were then talking about how to make sure you reach each and every student in your classes, particularly if they classes are big and some students are naturally more dominant than others. She was saying she teaches nearly 80 students directly and more than 100 indirectly, and she keeps a list of each and every one, and each week goest through the list and makes notes on conversations she's had with each and if she's not had a personal conversation with one of them, makes sure she does so the next week.  She said how easy it was for students to slip through the cracks. Especially if they were shy or unassuming or didn't participate easily due to language or cultural barriers.

When I was studying Chinese I had a lot of struggles.  It was difficult.  It was really really really hard. I had a lot of smart alecks in my class (watch those videos above!), I became quieter and quieter and lost my voice. And because I wasn't speaking, I couldn't speak and it became more and more difficult to speak. Then in my second year I got a really old teacher.  He was well into his 70's. He'd been doing this for years.  He lined us up into the traditional classroom, all facing forward.  And we went through the material methodically.  If we had to read, it wasn't on a voluntary basis. He started in the front and each and everyone had to read one sentence and then we'd move on to the next student. If our pronunciation was not up to scratch he's say "ting bu dong" (I hear but I don't understand" and gently but relentlessly correct us until we got it right. Same would happen with working through questions and assignments. If someone tried to jump in or interject or interrupt or mock or any of the other crap that had been going on up to then he'd look up fiercely and out stare them and we'd go on. 

I passed chinese. It was never easy for me no matter how easy studying had been to me before. I learnt first hand what it was to struggle as a student. I learnt how shame and fear could negatively impact on learning.  And it changed my views completely on who deserved to be heard and to participate in a classroom.  You know that cartoon about privilege?  It's not just about class or race or financial privilege.  Is also about learning and knowing how to learn. About whether you as a child were cultivated or left to nature (see JP Gee).  

I think about it often.  The right of every child to learn content and learn to think. About how are assessments, or teaching, our scaffolding our assumptions shape how far they will go. The explicit and the implicit things that stand in their way and our way of making the way clear. And how we don't even know sometimes that or what we are doing wrong. 

How I used to write

A little while back I did a review of Easybib as an assignment for one of my courses. It's a tool we recommend to our students.  For a while I was impressed by it's notetaking tool and I've tried using it a few times because it kind of makes intuitive sense. But it just doesn't work for me.  And I'm beginning to realise why.

After writing my last assignment I started thinking about this.  When I started out with my studies, it had been nearly 20 years since I'd done any studying.  It was a huge shock to the system. Tons of reading to do, an entirely new field / discipline / subject matter / jargon to master. Unknown demands and expectations and in addition doing it online where you had no eyeballing of your lecturer or fellow students, no way of seeing the nuances of what was being said or not said or left hanging.

Apart from some psychology as a dual major in my business degree and a bit of global politics and society during my MBA, I'd pretty much kept away from the humanities so this truly was a new ball game for me.  I tried to tackle it in what I thought was a logical way. I'd read something and then highlight the sections I found important. I'd read more of other stuff, highlighting highlighting and printing away a forest. And then when it came to the assignment, I'd try and string all those highlights of what all these famous and revered authors in the subject had to say, and weave it with some inter-leading words and paragraphs to make it some kind of coherent summary of the matter and assignment question at hand and submit it. And I got a pass or a credit. For which I was very grateful, because I knew, through the social network that was building up around me on FaceBook, that others were barely passing or failing the same assignments. I guess the ones with distinctions and higher distinctions didn't need to wallow in mutual sympathy and support, or they just weren't mentioning their relative success.

As time went by I became somewhat more experienced in the digital environment and finally had a breakthrough when a fellow student introduced me to Evernote and I could save a rainforest by saving all my notes and readings digitally.  It has a highlighting and annotating tool, but it wasn't ever comfortable to me, so I stopped highlighting.  Instead I started taking notes. With my own funny little colour coding and mind-mapping.  And then I would let things lie for a little bit. And go for long dog walks and talk to my colleagues and friends. Because the universe is big. And this is only one field. And they're specialists, so perhaps they don't really see the bigger picture. And slowly I'd start to form my own ideas about the topic at hand and the assignment question.  And then I'd see if I could find some kind of a structure and flow to my thoughts.  And only then would I start writing and as I came to a claim or assertion I'd revert back to Evernote and type in the keyword and see who else in the readings I'd done agreed with me, or disagreed with me and what they had to say. I could then check in my handwritten notes a summary of their ideas. And in that way I could back up my thoughts or criticise what they'd said.  In a sense that is exactly the opposite to what I'd been doing all my life.  And I think too, the opposite to the formulaic ways that teach notetaking and scaffolding and paraphrasing etc. And the opposite to how tools such as Easybib could lead to perfectly acceptable and passable assignment submissions, without any plagiarism in sight but ones where the students voice and thoughts and originality do not shine through.

My grades have improved in the interim. But I must admit I have also taken some risks, calculated risks whereby what I've written could be considered a little audacious or off the trodden path, and the it could have gone either way.  Funnily enough, the student who introduced me to Evernote remarked to me that she's gone the same way, as we sat for a lunch, nail biting waiting for the results from two different assignments in different courses where we'd both taken a bit of a risk.

Is this a sign of academic maturity? Daring to say what you think and believe? Is it what we should be teaching our students, or do they necessarily need the training wheels and scaffolding to get them there? Should we expect them to get to this point for everything, or just the subjects they're passionate about and topics they care about. Is it just another teachable trick that we could teach instead of the traditional read, note-take, paraphrase, cite, string together?  When in our academic lives are we just hitting the ball across the net and when are we playing the games to win the tournament?