Interesting, Jill - your students telling you when you're not practising
what you say you are attempting to do. I do recognise that. And mine, or
my colleagues, or sometimes the people up whose noses I get, also let me
know when my practice is out of synch with my values, thank goodness.
Sometimes it's hard to take and causes sleepless nights, but one grows...I
wanted to reflect, though, on one time when I got corrected for being too
hard on myself. I had a teacher exchange to the U.K. in 1994 (met Jack,
met Jean, worked with Jack Sanger in Norwich City College - great
experience all round!) On that visit, I got introduced to the use of
video to catch teaching practice. When I got home, I sent out a notice in
the staff bulletin asking if anyone would join me in an action research
project aiming to use video to help us improve our respective practice.
Only one woman, an Office Technology lecturer named Kate, took me up on it
(though I got a tentative enquiry from one of our male Agriculture
lecturers, but he never followed through).
We agreed to videotape an hour of our classes, after obtaining ethical
clearance from our students (in my case, these were fellow staff, as I was
a staff developer). When Kate and I met together to peer critique our
tapes, having perused them in advance ourselves, I cringed. Seeing
myself, theoretically, as a Freirean educator, what I saw on screen was a
fairly directive person who moved the conversation right along! So much
for liberatory, not banking, education, I thought. I expressed these
sentiments to Kate, expecting her to back me up. To my surprise, she had
another slant on the situation. I had set the video camera up to record
only me, so the students were not too bothered by being on camera. Kate
said what you couldn't see on the tape were the kinds of 'cues' that
teachers pick up, that attention is flagging or that questions are not
eliciting the responses one sought, and that perhaps the 'direction' arose
from my interpreting, probably correctly, that things needed more forward
movement. It was very charitable of her, and was also something that I
would not have thought of myself. The value of the critical friend in
action research!
I just wanted to share that with you Jill, and others if they're
interested, as I think sometimes we CAN be too hard on ourselves and need
the critical scrutiny of colleagues (as well as students) to help us to
discern accurately whether our values are, in fact, at variance with our
practice.
Warm regards
Pip
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