Summative course for Masters of Education Portfolio
Thoughts and responses on Facilitating Difficult Conversations in Spaces Deemed Educative
The
problem with silence as I see it is that is that regardless of the reason for
the silence, if "good men do (say) nothing" then that the loudest voice,
and the pushiest and most egotistical groups, will rise to the forefront of
influence in our society. These individuals and groups dictate to everyone else
in our society. It has been ever thus with our politicians and business
leaders. This silence, or inaction to be more precise, has lead us to the
financial, humanitarian and ecological crises we now face.
Ask our First Nations and the American
First peoples how strong, silent, and wise as worked out for them. You will get
a different version of events from the subjugated. I do see hope however. It came
after reading Naomi Klein's, This Changes Everything. People
and society in general are waking up to what is going on the global frontier of
commerce, business and ecology. It is causing mass mobilization and
participatory democracy worldwide. I think that schools, as microcosms of
society, should be focusing attentions (and technologies) in this arena of the
present for a sustainable future.
Speaking truth to power means we have
to speak, but only after concerted listening and critical thinking. The latter
trait I find sorely lacking in a lot of my colleagues and is almost
non-existent in high schools today with the ubiquity attention grabbing devices
and sites being put for as the ‘best way to learn’ or being perceived as more
efficient.
Dr.
King, Eugene Debs, John Lennon and a host of others have paid the
ultimate price for speaking out. Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Noam
Chomsky, and many other are trying to make people see through their silences,
and their words, but they are marginalized and derided until, people who are
unconcerned or unable to discern the propaganda, treat them as insane and they are ignored.
He who controls the conversation (or the
means of mass communications) controls the levers of power. That is why in any
revolutionary coup attempt, the first asset seized is the communications
network. So I guess what I am trying to say is that silence IS weakness within the corridors of
power that have now reached global proportions. Speaking up and standing up
are the only power of self-direction and autonomy we have. This must be taught
in school along with the silence of reflection, creativity and use of the
imagination.
References
Klein, N. (2015). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Simon and Schuster.
☯☯☯☯☯☯☯☯☯☯☯☯☯☯
Reflective practices in pedagogy
As with most discussions, I tend to go more for the underlying root problem rather than that
which is specific to my teaching or specific circumstance. Given this I believe
that being a reflective teacher with one’s pedagogy is a fundamental trait that
is underdeveloped in myself, and not well promoted in our accredited teacher
training institutions
I prefer Ellen Rose’s definition on reflection which entails
solitude and slowness and not the Dewey’s /Schön alternation of it as an
element of the scientific process and action-based at all times (Rose 2013).
Meandering thought and quietude to make connections during reflection that were
not noticed before; that serendipity effect that gives us that eureka moment
much as brain researcher has shown happens during REM sleep. This is
concomitant with the fact that the brain will only let in that which it deems
important. If one is not attending or actively listening because of poor or
non-existent skills, then it is irrelevant whether it is a student,
administration, or colleagues being shut blocked. Since we battle daily with
our ineffective and counter-productive listening habits (The Eight Habits
of Lousy Listeners ). I believe we must be trained to be an active listeners,
and then to reflect on what is heard, so that we can “seek first to understand
and then to be understood”. This would ideally be developed as a career-long
critical thinking process that would extend into all education fields and into
one’s own life.
I suspect digital
technologies are exacerbating these phenomena, as we are continually bombarded
by messages we have to quickly, without thought, decide are important or
irrelevant. Add to this that message input allowance for encoding is dictated to by our life experiences, abilities, skills,
biases, predilections, which explains another reason for attention/listening
triage. We are bound to our brain’s filtering mechanism, in order to avoid experience
cogitative overload and burn-out, but in the end we miss important information
for our teaching and learning practices and our lives.
Tied to the prevailing
educational power structures, since if everyone is speaking and all opinions
are valid, then he who speaks the loudest, becomes the only one heard and
therefore the most valid. Opinions are given equal weighting with fact and
therefore just accepted as having equal merit.
References
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.
Rose, E. (2013). On Reflection: An Essay on Technology,
Education, and the Status of Thought in the 21st Century. Canadian Scholars’
Press.
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