Kia ora ... that racism is pretty close to the surface!!

I love the words of a wonderful colleague of mine who says that we live in a multicultural society in a bi-cultural nation. If you don't like that, you may want to stop reading now, because you are not going to like the rest of this post.

A part of our biculturalism is our multilingual status (three official languages as I understand it - Te Reo Māori, English, and Sign). I have only a small knowledge of Te Reo Māori so far, something I am working on. In my opinion it's a beautiful language, a tāonga for Aoteoroa: it is the only place in the world in which Te Reo Māori is spoken. There isn't a 'somewhere else' that you can go to speak it. It is beholding on us both morally and legally to sustain and grow the language. Lorraine and I attended two night classes run by Anton Matthews here in Christchurch, introductory classes to Te Reo. He expressed the desire to see us all normalise the use of te Reo, even if it is as simple as saying Kia ora. I love that.

Kia ora

In that spirit, one of my goals for Hornby High School is that we hear Māori spoken as often as English around the kura. It's a BHAG, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, but I love ambition. A part of that journey for me (on top of the deliberate an intentional work I do to expand my vocabulary and understanding) is that I greet everyone at our kura in Te Reo, without exception .. normally a 'Kia ora', sometimes a 'mōrena', or an 'ata marie', or even a 'tēnā koe' .. you get the idea. In my head that has become normalised, and that's what I want to happen across the kura. You have to start somewhere.

Now here's the thing: as a result I simply do that whenever greet people, on the street, in a shop, wherever. This afternoon I was in our front garden pottering away (dead heading flowers actually, not that that matters), and several groups of people walked past, out for a stroll in the first sun we have seen for three or four days. I automatically said 'Kia ora'. The responses gave me pause to think, to feel sad, to feel sick in fact. In each case. the people immediately looked away, and did not return the greeting.

Why?

Maybe they didn't hear me. I doubt it, we were pretty close. Maybe they were embarrassed and not sure how to respond. Possibly, but all three groups? Maybe there was an assumption about my race, and so a discomfort.. I suspect so. I am of European descent by the way.

What does this all mean? Well, I can't draw any conclusion with any certainty, but I have a suspicion. My suspicion is that what I was seeing was racism. There was this assumption about me which then evoked the 'look away and ignore' response. From my position of white privilege I guess I have the luxury of assuming the best - that it was not racism. I am choosing not to make that assumption, but rather to suspect that racism is exactly what I was seeing. It was bloody uncomfortable.

So my suggestion to you: as a social experiment (and also as a way of supporting the use of the second of our aural languages in Aotearoa), just try greeting everyone with kia ora, or tēnā koe, rather than hello. See what happens, see how it feels. At the very least you will help normalise the language. I actually hope however that you may also see just how close to the surface you will find an underlying racism. It is only from a place of personal of discomfort, I think, that those of us with our 'white privilege' will make the changes that we need if we are to be a genuinely bicultural nation.

I will persist with my BHAG.. I will persist in  my use of Te Reo Māori, not in a way meant to intimidate, but rather in my intent to normalise its use. After all, you don't see that response in Canada where French and English are both official language!! But of course both of those languages are spoken by those of European descent.

Kia tau te mauri

Robin

New thinking about learning and 'education'

Tonight I spent two and  a half hours with the senior leadership team of Hornby High School. I have been incredibly privileged to have been offered the position as their Principal at the start of term 2.

Now for a start, these are very talented people. The school is to be almost entirely rebuilt over the next two to three years, and so we are digging deeply into pedagogy in order to make sure that the architects give us a built environment that meets the needs of the pedagogy.

Some things that come to mind:

1. The national curriculum may be organised into learning areas, but that doesn't mean that the learning has to be delivered in discreet chunks that map onto those learning areas.
2. NCEA is not a set price meal but a rich smorgasbord, and like a good smorgasbord you don't have to eat everything on the table to satisfy your hunger
3. We all excel at things that excite us. As teachers we need to stop assuming that because we have a degree in a subject our students will be excited by it (when often we may not be either)
4. Young people care about their world (possibly even more than we older folk do). Give them an opportunity to solve real world problems, big problems, problems that matter.
5. Knowledge matters, but knowledge can be gained from anywhere these days. The online revolution has seen to that
6. Soft skills matter. No employer wants an employee who cannot work with others, an employee who cannot think creatively and critically, and NO amount of maths will give you that.
7. As a team we can solve problems that seem insurmountable when we sit alone.

There's a heck of a lot more, but that's enough to be going on with. Whatever we come up with, the community deserves an aspirational school, a school that makes them go wow!! A school that takes their breath away.

School leadership and 'moral purpose'.

I have been interested in the concept of 'moral purpose' in education. This has increasingly been a feature of the leadership literature.

Our New Zealand Ministry of Education has this to say:

Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school. Barber and Fullan (2005) explain that: “The central moral purpose consists of constantly improving student achievement and ensuring that achievement gaps, wherever they exist, are narrowed.” For a school to achieve this, there needs to be a shared commitment to explicit values.

Source http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Attitudes-values-and-ethics/Moral-purpose-and-shared-leadership

Professor David Hopkins, in an article titled 'Leadership for powerful learning' (ACEL Journal Term 2 2015, Vol 37 No 2) states:

Leaders are driven by a moral purpose about enhancing student learning. Moral purpose activates the passion to reach for the goal and prompts leaders to empower teachers and others to make schools a critical force for improving communities"

Now there's a powerful statement.

Eric Mazur on "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"

Last week I had the privilege of attending this year's Edutech 2015 conference in Brisbane. Much about the conference was a mere shadow of the previous few years, but the stand-out session was the opening keynote address by Eric Mazur of Harvard University titled "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"in which Mazur posits that current assessment is not fit for purpose.

My colleagues and I co-constructed some notes during the session, but it is doubtless easier to watch an earlier version of the same address given by Mazur in 2013. It is very similar to that which he gave last week.

Education for innovation

I have been doing  a lot of thinking about what the future shape of education might be. This began because we have some opportunities arising at work for curriculum change, fed by an appetite for some change. Recent events have offered additional insights that are tantalising to say the least.

Recently a number of us visited some of the folk at the EPIC centre in Christchurch. The insights gained form the visit and ensuing conversations were exciting to say the least, and perhaps the most exciting aspect of those conversations is the changing nature of society, and the need to promote innovation and wealth creation.

This started some ears back with Jane Gilbert's work 'Catching the knowledge wave' in which she effectively redefined knowledge for know stuff to doing stuff. For Jane knowledge had ceased to be a noun and become a verb. The EPIC guys want people who can work independently, people who are literate and numerate, but people who can think outside the square. These people are risk takers, not necessarily with wealth, but certainly with ideas.

I posed the question in a recent parent newsletter:

"I want to know how we produce even more innovative and creative people who become leaders in their fields. And when I mention fields of endeavour I have to confess to being agnostic. We might well be talking about the gaming industry or industrial chemistry, but equally we might be talking about the music industry or the law, the visual arts or languages and diplomacy."

As  a consequence I have been pondering how schools need to restructure to do this. The purpose of this post isn't to answer that question but to consider the circumstances in which that question must be answered. My own early thinking went something like this:

We want teenagers to be innovators, we want them to be risk takers (in terms of their thinking, they are already risk takers in many other ways). We want them to move beyond knowing to thinking. Of course this doesn't mean that we abandon knowing stuff. You can't think in a vacuum, you have to know stuff in order to be able to think about it. The question then is how do we encourage teens to get to know stuff in a way that is engaging, in a way that harnesses their natural risk taking behaviour in a safe way?

At this point in time I created this obstacle in my mind: education is currently judged by society by a series of outcomes best defined in terms of the assessment/qualifications system, in our case NCEA. We have to teach to the assessment in order to get the results that communities judge as a measure of a quality school and a quality education, so we are hide bound to stay with the current industrial model of education organised into time periods, subject specialists and classrooms.

The alternative is to have students organise and manage projects focussed on innovation and creativity. But hang on, most teens can't do that particularly well, so maybe we just have a 'select few' able to do this while the remainder conform to the traditional models?

Well actually maybe more teens can do this than we think. And maybe NCEA isn't the constraint we think it is at all, maybe it is the liberating mechanism with its modular approach. Maybe we have taken up the cudgel with NCEA (of which I am a fan by the way) by simply slotting it into the old industrial system. Maybe in fact NCEA is the system for the new era of innovation. I am increasingly of the opinion that we have allowed ourselves to become fixated with the process of assessment rather than the process of education and learning. It is from the latter two that innovation comes, not from the former.

I have much more thinking to do on this, but this is enough writing for one post. I have a friend who writes tediously long posts that I rarely read because they are just too long.

I found this blog post by Claire Amos "Navigating the space between educational paradigms"
challenging and interesting. You may too.

Magic can be taught ... yep