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YEAR of WONDERS: finding the revelations in the revolution
Kate Wiedemann Secondary Teacher
In the ‘cracks’ caused by this worldwide crisis, teachers are reflecting on what can be valued most in learning.
About a week ago, a member post on my Facebook reading group reminded me of the odd synchronicities between
fiction and fact. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks’ (2001) novel ‘The Year of Wonders’ is set in the plagueridden England of the 1600s; we are set amidst our own version of the pest that has caused disruption and devastation of a global scale. Similarly, just as the heroine in Brooks’ fabula finds a sense of personal revelation in the revolutionary shifts to community, society, life itself, the disruptive shifts to learning communities and education practices are a paradox: a curse and a blessing for educators. On the one hand, it has resulted in a seismic shift to school learning – catastrophically so, in the world’s unluckier quarters – at the expense of all in the school community. And yet, on the other, it has opened a crack that allows educators to explore and reframe the central tenets of what learning communities should and could be.
Vulnerability is the new normal
Almost immediately as the pandemic changed education delivery, educators began chronicling their own reflections: their reactions to the disaster and their predictions for the role and relationships of teaching. Appropriate to the global nature of this shift, the initial angst of change was felt globally by teachers. In the United States – struck, at the point of writing, with the world’s grimmest mortality statistics – the reverberations of change were palpable. Professor of Education at Pennsylvania State University Anne Whitney (2020) wrote on the National Council of Teachers of English official blog of the exhaustion of teachers who had reflexively jumped to ‘offer something’: solutions, extra care, extra resources, extra tutoring. She highlighted the reluctance of teachers – so inured to serve and to solve problems – to admit to their grief of change. Vulnerability, for some, has become socially anathema; vulnerability becomes associated with ‘helplessness’, which is anything but true. Yet teachers’ reflexive and automatic responses to ‘do more’ – borne certainly out of a vocational desire to help and support our student community – are also driven by other personal, systemic and environmental factors, not the least of which is the performative culture in which teaching as a global profession increasingly operates.
New names, new identities?
As an English teacher, it is my job and interest to understand language in all its shape-shifting uses in public discourse. Decades-old terms such as ‘service delivery’ and ‘performativity’ are now a well-worn part of the verbal terrain of education (Ball 2003), but teachers generally resist implications that their practice – influential academic Stephen J Ball (2003) extends this further to their ‘soul’ – can be redesignated as merely transactional. Yet through this crisis and teacher responses of professionalism, some clear public appellations are emerging: the language of the heroic, the stoic, and the ‘high performer’ is now waxing. The monikers can be both a boon and a bane. For example, Griffith University Professor Donna Prendergast’s (2020) comment on 25 May upon Queensland students’ return to school sites on the ‘newfound respect many members of the community have for teachers not only for the amazing job they do teaching the next generation but for the enabling role they play keeping the economy flowing’ is both affirming for teachers and a reminder that education is often perceived by society a high value cog in the service economy. Ironically, the praises and odes for educators’ alacrity and diligence that have sprung forth in the past months on Facebook feeds, celebrity shout-outs to ‘awesome’ teachers and educator leaders and advocates may themselves serve to perpetuate a mythology of the teacher ‘model performer’. In lieu of a hyperawareness of performance, academics such as SUNATA 53
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Aisha Ahmad, professor of political science at the University of Toronto, have reflected that teachers in the immediacy of the COVID-19 crisis ‘must…now more than ever…abandon the performative and embrace the authentic’ (Ahmad 2020). ‘Our essential mental shifts require humility and patience ... And they will be slower than keener academics are used to. Be slow … Let it change how you think and how you see the world. Because the world is our work,’ Ahmad said.
Relocating the conduit?
Arguably the most obvious implication of the school shutdown was the transfer to the home as the site of learning and the radical domestic rearrangements this necessitated. On top of the costs in teacher and parent time, mental effort, and the emotional load of trying to jointly find and apply solutions in what is essentially a constantly changing game, it has opened questions about the role of the home in learning. Professor Julian Sefton-Green (2020) foreshadows as much in his article for Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) website EduResearch Matters in April when he remarks: ‘ … now the home will simply be the new conduit for the school thus enabling all children to exist in an entirely individualised relationship with the state. That is a very particular and culturally specific definition of what we want education to do and certainly we need to ask whether that is an appropriate model for a post- pandemic society,” (Sefton-Green 2020). As a teacher and a parent of two high-schoolers, I have asked myself the same question. It is warm testament and a vote of confidence from a wider learning community to think learning and instruction have been ‘seamless’, but the seams are there nonetheless. As both a teacher and a parent to school-aged children, I have seen first-hand where the points of strain can arise for students, parents and teachers over the past months. They come in the little missed deadlines; overlooked emails or instructions; small misunderstandings that threaten to grow larger; unreliable or intermittent access to technology; difficulties navigating new information platforms; corresponding shifts to the teacher’s pedagogy; and the inevitable reduction of the collaborative opportunities that arise naturally from in-class social learning. These have been undeniably significant realities to resolve for our learners.
REVELATIONS Yet this unprecedented phenomenon – our own ‘Year of Wonders’ - is a strange blessing in that it has pushed educational matters to the forefront of public consciousness, has highlighted the great strengths of educators, and is an opportunity to reassert that which is most central and valuable in a learning community. For educators, the difference between a future that will see us successfully negotiating – rather than being controlled by – constant change is arguably in our professional commitment, our adaptability and agility for education design, and the continued fostering of cooperation and collaboration across all stakeholders.
Commitment to professional goals
Even as they urged educators and learning communities to resist performative pressures, academics such as Ahmad (2020) believe teachers’ expertise and commitment will triumph, in whatever shape post-pandemic education assumes. ‘On the other side of this journey…are hope and resilience. We will know that we can do this, even if our struggles continue for years. We will be creative and responsive, and will find light in all the nooks and crannies' (Ahmad 2020). More locally, Prendergast (2020) of Griffith University alludes to the ability of committed vocationalists to withstand the vagaries of global fortune when she observed that ‘they [teachers] have displayed courage, commitment and capability…they have shown us why they became teachers’. In my own school, this same professional dedication and conscientiousness characterised the immediate responses and hard work of colleagues. It was often a case of ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ as our work was stripped back to our purest goals. In the face of a crisis, the ‘why’ of teaching assumes its rightful place again; the ‘how’ becomes a problem that can be solved with ingenuity.
Adaptability and Agility
Teachers’ ability to adapt to challenge and change has been well recognised as a high value professional and personal attribute (Collie & Martin 2016). Yet the more important word in 2020 may be ‘agility’, implying a nimbleness of mindset to find opportunities in change, rather than simply endure change. More and more experts assert that education needs to develop new approaches towards what is called the ‘age of agility’ (Gaulden & Gottlieb 2017).
The Agility movement, first arising in the Agile Manifesto 2001 in the world of software design, has been re-purposed over the past two decades across other domains, from business, leadership and, more recently, education design. What makes this mindset so appropriate for the pandemic age is its core learner-centred values of individuals and interactions over processes and tools; meaningful learning over measurement of learning; stakeholder collaboration over complex negotiation; and responsiveness to change over following a set plan (Briggs 2014).
This nimbleness is praised in Prendergast’s (2020) statement that: ‘Teachers have been absolute champions as they have created learning in a way never before anticipated, at a pace never before imagined.’ I observed this mindset as the collegiate community in my school embraced the new or the unfamiliar into their own teaching practices. Teachers’ information technology skills were broadened, but more excitingly, those capabilities were hybridised, adapted uniquely to the teacher’s pedagogy. The end game – quality interactions with students – informed the selection of tools and processes, not the other way around. This is the heart of ‘design thinking’ and problem-based learning, achieved with equal measures of intuition and critical thinking. It was a heartening reminder of our ability to innovate, even under duress – indeed, perhaps because of duress – when aimed at the common good (Marope et al. 2018).
Cooperative Communities
If the COVID-crisis has shown us anything, it is that connection and cooperation is the centre of learning. As school buildings and playgrounds fell silent for months, we looked for this connection online. But the agile mindset school reaffirms the primacy of the face-to-face, the social dimension of citizenship and physical spatial interaction with shared place. Andreas Schleicher (2020), Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, highlights this in his post to TeacherMagazine.com, citing the potential ‘fracturing’ of the ‘social fabric created in and by schools’ as perhaps the greatest risk in this crisis. “Learning is not a transactional process, where students are passive consumers of content, where schools are service providers and where parents are clients. “Learning always happens through interaction and in an environment of wellbeing and self-efficacy for both learners and teachers.” On a personal level, the collegial connection within my own school faculty and staff became a thread that wove throughout my days online, a cord that allowed me to debrief or consult in ways that were more spontaneous because our interactions were driven by genuine need: need for sociability, for relief, for encouragement, for problem solving, or for advice. I learned how my sensory faculties of listening were just as important – if not more so – as my faculty for talking. There were many moments of teamwork and the engagement in the art of concession in my own household as we negotiated a new timetable, and physically transformed our home into High School. But the isolation from my students, and my observation of my own children isolated from their school environments confirmed for me that learning together – learner- teacher- home – is a natural extension of the basic human need for others.
Natural Wonders
This experience has caused me to go back to literature and history – my teaching specialities and my passions – to think of the way that events both real and fictionalised reflect so much about our experiences. I have realised that the books and the historical events most meaningful to me are often organised around twin themes of devastation and regeneration. The fall of one empire brought another, hopefully more enlightened, reign. The end of a world war resulted in a new consciousness against mass warfare. And the temporary shutdown of our scheduled lives made us more mindful of how we restock our days. In the same way, the tremors from this natural disaster have opened some space, some questions about what we value in learning and schools, that – far from making us disquiet – are opportunity to reaffirm and redesign that which does most good for all.
References
Ahmad, A 2020, ‘Why You Should Ignore All That CoronavirusInspired Productivity Pressure’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 March, viewed 27 May 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/WhyYou-Should-Ignore-All-That/248366/ Briggs, S 2014, ‘Agile based learning: What is it and how can it change education?’ Open Colleges, Viewed 25 May 2020, https://www. opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/agile-based-learning-what-is-itand-how-can-it-change-education/ Brooks, G 2001, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, Fourth Estate, London. Collie, RJ & Martin, AJ 2016, ‘Adaptability: An important capacity for effective teachers’, Educational Practice and Theory, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 27-39. Sefton-Green, J 2020, ‘Will Mass Schooling-at-home lead to the death of schools?’ EduResearch Matters, 13 April, viewed 24 May 2020, https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=5378 Prendergast, D 2020, ‘Easing the Transition Back to School’, Griffith University News, 25 May 2020, viewed 28 May 2020, https://news. griffith.edu.au/2020/05/25/easing-the-transition-back-to-school/ Ball, SJ & Olmedo, A 2013, ‘Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities’, Critical Studies in Education, vol. 54, no. 1. Marope, M, Griffin, P & Gallagher, C 2018, ‘Future Competencies and the Future of Curriculum – A Global Reference for Curricula Transformation’, International Bureau of Education – UNESCO, viewed 25 May 2020, https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q =international+bureau+of+education&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Schleicher, A 2020. ‘International education and Covid-19 – Insights from TALIS’, Teacher Magazine, 25 March, viewed 26 May 2020, https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/columnists/andreas-schleicher/ international-education-and-covid-19-insights-from-talis Whitney, AE 2020, ‘The gift of offering nothing’, National Council of Teachers of English, 9 April, viewed 29 April 2020, https://ncte.org/ blog/2020/04/gift-offering-nothing/ SUNATA 55
