Dear Mohsen – Assalaam Wa Alaikum; Hi Jack, Sarah and all

Thanks for your lovely poem Mohsen: I ruminated in the Rumi-like roominess of the runes within and out with rubric.

Yet your response about evidence intrigues and interests me in respect of developing confidence in my own ‘teaching practice’ standard of judgements.

The course evaluation reports are fabulous: they help me see you in your teaching spaces.  Clearly you are a very fine and accomplished educator.  

Not only do you have a doctorate but you are what Jack Whitehead would call a ‘doctoral educator’ based on the ‘evidence’ of feedback.

I am taking the British PGCHE (postgraduate certificate in higher education). It is a programme aimed at raising awareness and developing skills sets in curricula, and pedagogic issues in higher education.  Some of my colleagues on the programme are disparaging of it because they perceive it to be a ‘tick box’ approach in respect of skills and standards.  While I have some sympathy for this view I’m also enjoying the course: first it provides the ‘only’ forum in my HEI for a public discourse about how we teach. Secondly, a requirement of the course is to conduct three teaching observations. Other than working with co-tutors in training work, this is the very first time I’ve had colleagues ‘formally’ observe me work with students (other than Jack Whitehead with my Masters group) and assess me against certain ‘preset’ criteria (standards for judging my teaching practice) and my own disclosed criteria,; and I have been through a process of ‘skeri-fication’ (scarification – sifting, scraping) of my own practice with my assessors afterwards.

I have their observations and I will post these as attachments to a future posting as I wish to explore some ideas around them.  

For me, these assessments are ‘evidence’ of my pedagogic and educational standards of judgment as follows:

• I’m prepared to have my work observed in order to progress my classroom professionalism
• One standard is that I’m, prepared to put my judgments into the public forum of the academy and have them observed as satisfactory/unsatisfactory
• I’m taking risk in, with and through my practice of being ‘judged’
• I’m ‘mune’ to the possibility of disconfirming feedback - my ego could be ransacked J
• Observation feedback is influencing how I go differently into my next classroom
• One of my students has said – I enjoyed being subjected to the discipline you brought to this supervision…let’s do it again!’ His educational judgment has been influenced

When I place this form of ‘evidence’ as merely a representation of my teaching practice alongside multi-media explorations of my teaching practice I’m beginning to get a much more effective picture of my strengths and limitations as an educator, teacher, mentor, and coach.

In this I’m becoming more inclined to take my critical questions and stick them….sorry, turn them inwards, appropriately and with care, into my own self-critical, self-reflexive interrogation instead of turning my critical questioning outwards, and onto others. The shift in focus of my skeri-fication as a critical skill from ‘blaming others’ towards ‘accepting my own weaknesses’ is helping my consciousness of care to emerge as a standard of judgment I bring to my classes as ‘inclusional spaces’. I intend posting some evidence of this to the list.  

Slowly, I’m learning how to contain my anxieties and allow them to speak to me sweetly under the shade of the ratab tree in the oases of teacherly contemplation. In this I’ve been influenced by you, Mohsen, and hugely by Jack Whitehead who, alongwith Munawar Saeed, Peter Maddox, Keith Sisson, Nigel Bridges, and Alan Rayner have influenced my understanding of what it means to be a serious teacher whose standards are forever forming, deforming, reforming, and performing.

I would like to return to this theme Mohsen, with some carefully critical and caring thoughts about Jack’s influence on my educational standards of judgment and practice.  For now your influence on my contemplation of my practice is both self and other evident.

Blessings

Yaakub Murray