Diverse Learning
Victoria University
Angela Daddow, Amanda Carr
This presentation was part of the 2011 DEECD Innovation Showcase on 13 May.
This podcast is brought to you by the Department of Education and Early Childhood
Development, Victoria.
Speaker 1:
Good morning. Is it still morning… afternoon? I’m Angela Daddow.
Speaker 2:
And I’m Amanda Carr.
Speaker 1:
And we are both from Victoria University, although we are from different
sections of Victoria University. I’m from the Curriculum Innovation Unit and
my focus is around curriculum innovation, however I do have a background in
social work, and social work and community services education and
vocational education as well.
Speaker 2:
I teach academic skills and research skills, academic discourse in a multi
disciplinary area, where we prepare students for entry into the arts.
Speaker 1:
Yep, we are going to talk about a program that we were involved in last year,
as well with a couple of other colleagues were part of our team where we
enabled students… we developed a pedagogy to enable students to develop
quite complex writing skills and abilities while they were actually studying
their discipline in the diploma, so slightly different model to what’s traditionally
used, so we are going to talk a bit about that. Although we are presenting,
sort of, in a tertiary context, we’re hoping that you’ll be able, that we… you
will be able to stimulate your thinking a bit and you will be able to apply some
of the elements of the pedagogy, or some of the thoughts and ideas into your
sort of context as well. I’m not sure if… most of you might know about
Victoria University, but I’m just going to give you a really quick sort of runthrough. We have 11 campuses most of which are in the western suburbs of
Melbourne, some in the city, and of course you probably all know that the
western suburbs have the most, well… a very high proportion of low socioeconomic groups as well as a very high cultural diversity.
And we have quite an explicit appreciation of diversity in our values, where
we see it as contributing to the richness of… and creativity of learning
environments, and also around equity for students and staff. In fact there are
few universities in Australia that are as diverse as we are. We are a dual
sector university which means we deliver both higher education, further
education and also vocational education - TAFE as it is more commonly
known. But our university in Australia has the highest representative of both
groups of students from low socio-economic groups as well as from culturally
1
and linguistically diverse backgrounds. So we’ve sort of had to do a lot of
thinking around diversity, around learning and diversity and what actually
works. There are a whole range of programs and this is one of them.
You are also probably aware that the current, sort of, government policy
around tertiary education is to increase participation, particularly of groups of
students who are not normally represented, so Indigenous, low socioeconomic groups, people with disabilities etc. In our experience, nontraditional students often find universities quite alienating even at the
vocational TAFE education level, it often has expectations that are quite
foreign, and language and discourse that’s quite, quite, well alienating. And
we’re aware of the risk of creating an underclass of students where they
actually feel more inadequate than empowered, and we’re also aware of the
sort of, the reality of differentiation between - social differentiation between people who have the advantages of some congruence between their
backgrounds and, and the education environment, the learning environment
in which they find themselves - I mean, it’s true of schools as well.
We’re going to start with our experience of diversity and, and the beginning,
the early beginnings of this project with a story. And the story starts from
when I was actually a program manager in community services, and I had in
my office a tall mature age black African man from Sudan, and he was in my
office with his, one of his teachers and a student support worker… and he
was very angry. And one of the reasons he was ang... well, I will tell you why
he was there before I tell you why he was angry. He was there because he
was about in the 2nd year of his Diploma in Community Development, he was
about to go on his final placement and he was about to transition to…
towards graduation. And he’d passed all his written work - am I too close? he passed all his written work… actually it was distinctions by this stage… he
had progressed quite a lot there was no obvious plagiarism, however when
we got him to do ind... and other students to do independent writing tasks in
class, he was actually writing like a primary school age person.
When we tried to delicately explore this disparity, he… his dignity was quite
affronted and also he had done what we asked, or what we had suggested
earlier on in the class, in the course. He’d gone to other parallel English
language classes, he had gone to what we call Concurrent Assistance, which
is like our student support service, but he had gone every day - he was in the
office every day getting assistance with his work, he’d immersed himself in
the discipline and sort of, as we sort of tried to do it in a trial and error kind of
way and hope people would pick things up. So he’d done all those things
and now we’re saying ‘Hold on; you’re getting distinctions but we’re worried
about your work -readiness and your readiness to go into placement’. So, it
was after, after thinking about that conversation, not fully resolving it, that
we… I decided to make a phone call to our language and learning area in the
university - and we are fortunate to have a very highly effective one - and we
started to explore what we could do for students because this was not
uncommon and it wasn’t only CULD students, students who come from
cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds, it was actually students who
were quite unfamiliar with academic discourse, students who were first, first
in the family at university and we had quite a lot of those, students who
perhaps, particularly, I guess, in vocational education who had not
necessarily succeeded all that well through the education system, so they
2
weren’t terribly comfortable in that sort of environment. So it was not
uncommon, so we started to explore what we could do to, to progress these
students more effectively and not leave them in this situation, and us, in a
way.
The reality with diverse students is we can’t assume any fixed starting point,
and similarly we can’t actually assume a fixed end point, but at the same time
we don’t want to lower standards. So this creates our dilemma and
particularly around English language and literacy areas, because the
traditional approach is, we’ll get some literacy or English language teachers
in, we’ll try and fix their grammar. But of course they’re all at different places,
the grammatical sort of errors or, or differences, or expressions are at
different places, so it’s actually fairly inefficient to try and just come in and fix
grammar, and that’s often separate and disconnected with the actual
discipline. And we also didn’t want to perpetuate the deficit model, really, of
‘you’ve got something wrong with you and we are going to fix you’, so we
wanted to try and explore alternative ways, ways of addressing the problem.
So we turned to, well, some of you may be aware of the socio-cultural theory
of learning, where… instead of seeing knowledge as some sort of fixed point
where people enter some kind of learning environment, they absorb some
information, concepts, and then they go out the other end with those
somehow internalised… Instead of seeing knowledge like that, we thought
about knowledge as being held amongst knowledgeable people in, in, in
ways that they communicate with each other through language and text. So
if knowledge is held in these communities and we - and they’re… they’re
called discourse communities - how do we help or support and scaffold nontraditional students to actually start to participate in that discourse
community?
Learning then becomes a process of the student becoming a user of that
specialist discourse, and a learner becomes a growing participant in the
knowledge community. Now, that participation happens at different levels
and in different ways that we can talk about and we’ll demonstrate it a bit
later. As you are aware, academic disciplines are even in… you know, again
a diploma level 2, which is sort of pitched at first year university, the
disciplines, the discourse communities are highly analytical, they’re very
focused on writing and they’re analytical and they’re critical. And these are
the sort of areas that are quite often, often quite foreign to less traditional
students or non-traditional students. To participate in those discourses, it
supports students or helps them find places of, of empowerment and those
who are not well supported to or, or scaffolded to participate conversely
become disempowered. Again, we didn’t want to reinforce it through our
curriculum and our teaching practices and our pedagogy we didn’t want to
reinforce that disempowered sort of model.
Related to the notion of discourse community we also looked at… actually at
identities. Our identities are formed, obviously, as we know, often through
the discourses of our cultural, geographic, social, language backgrounds.
And I guess you can think about that in terms of the, you know, thinking
about teenagers from four different parts of the world, Hong Kong, Northern
Territory, Melbourne, Papua New Guinea Highlands. So the, our actual
3
identity is formed very much through language and discourse with the
inherent sort of power relationships that exist in those. Now when… when
people come into discourse communities of… in the tertiary environment or
even the secondary education environment particularly at the upper levels,
they’re actually being drawn in to, to, to shift, make some identity shifts, to
particularly using writing and text as a medium for that, but there are shifts in
identity and we would argue that non- traditional students actually have
greater shifts in those identities to make than more traditional and, and
differently resourced students. These concepts come from critical literacy.
I’m going to hand over in a moment to Amanda who’s going to talk about
some of the specifics and the practicalities of the, the program and also show
you some student work, because we have been actually really excited by the
some of the shifts in student writing and we’re in a process of… just about to
set up some formal evaluation because of the findings have been quite
exciting and not only from CULD students but also from Anglo students who
have actually found it quite transformative. I just want to say before I hand
over to Amanda, I just want to clarify that we, we - trying to think where to
start - all students who did the diploma participated in this program, so we
didn’t select out any, any particular students - all students - it was
mainstreamed into the program. The only people who were excluded were
those who had a ‘recognition of prior learning’. So, we had existing core
units - sociology and communication - so everyone had to do them, and we
actually had language teachers teaching the writing components in the
communication unit, and we imported an academic skills and skill
development research unit from another area as an elective and all students
were required to do that. And that’s, and in that imported unit the sociology
material was deeply embedded into the writing skills, but I’ll let Amanda sort
of talk to you about that in a bit more detail.
Speaker 2:
Thanks, Angela. This was a process of what we call embedding, but the way
that the communication unit went into the sociology was from our point of
view an adjunct subject, and it gives you the impression that these two are
firmly linked and on an equal basis. I’m going to talk about the nuts and bolts
of how this worked, because I was the teacher in the classroom at the time.
I’ll start… I want to start with the idea of collaboration and how that worked.
We were actually working within a grant project and so there were two
teachers from the language area and two from the sociology unit, and when
we met together it was really important to go through what Angela has just
talked about, and that is the theory of knowledge, and particularly, I guess,
from our point of view it was really important that the sociology teachers saw
language as being very much connected to the knowledge that were
teaching in their classes, but likewise it was really important for us to see
sociology as the discipline that we were totally contextualising the language
into.
So the first meetings were about explaining the context, the concepts of
sociology that were important to the sociology teachers, and this could be of
course relevant to any particular discipline, so it’s not necessarily just linked
to sociology although sociology in… in a… I guess… is a highly theoretical
sort of discipline and so that was sort of important for conceptual
development.
4
The first things that we looked at were the assessments, and we were trying
to… and I will show you something in a minute about that… but we were
trying to step the development of students writing in tandem with what they
were actually learning, so the more theories they were learning, the more
they were able to develop their language into, say, from reflection - talking
about the self - to argument, where they’re talking about competing theories.
The writing tasks that we developed for the language class were all about
developing the identity. So… and I’m going to show you quite a few texts of
students and show you how they stepped out that change of identity from the
sort of the naïve known world that they were… came into the course with all
their diversity… into a very unifying and cohesive world of the academic
sociology world. In particular we also looked at the selection of readings, so
instead of just having a whole lot of academic readings that were good for
theory, we looked at text in terms of language, and I will talk a little bit more
about that, too.
All right, this is really just a pictorial outline of what Angela has already talked
about. As you can see, texts were really fundamental and really central to
our idea of… to the materials and the activities that we were using. Students
were supported to see themselves as participants within the texts. We were
interested, as I said, in looking at what people do inside the text. So the
experts use predictable forms, they have a repertoire of key words or concept
words, they evaluate competing theories, and all of these ways of
participating in the text are actually contained in the features. So you can
see… we started with reflection - that’s because reflection was really meeting
the student at the point that they were at coming into the course. If you think
about the diversity, one of the things that they have in common is their
experiences, so we started there, linking just one theory to their experiences.
We moved out into an oral presentation – thanks - we moved out into an oral
presentation where we were representing students… students had to
represent theories at work. Then, again moving out from the self, we were
looking at the real world and we decided to use a case study, still just
applying one theory to that world. Finally, and this, I guess, was the be-all
and end-all of the academic participation, they were asked to write an
argument essay where they were using competing theories to… positioning
one against the other and entering into debate.
So now I would like to go into what we actually did and some of the
assessments and step you through the process of looking at one in
particular. The first one, and to show you what was expected of the
students, and how they did it… When we looked at the first reflective essay,
we said, “Well… the sociology teachers said… “ok; what we want students to
be able to do is to apply sociology, the sociological imagination… we want
them to describe the self, and they need to be able to do that in terms of
functionalism, whatever that is, describe, discuss experiences and use
academic style and conventions.
When you look at these criteria you can sort of see that the first two deal with
knowledge, which might be picked up in, obviously picked up in a sociology
class, but the second two are possibly to do with language and may just be
left up to chance. Particularly the last one, often, was just a case of
5
immersion or perhaps concurrent assistance in a worst case scenario. When
we looked at those criteria, we sort of re-imaged them - we saw them from
our own point of view and we shared that, and we also looked at how we
were going to teach these sorts of skills but not just the academic
conventions. We weren’t just interested in being delegated the language,
and that had never worked, so we looked at the first two criteria as well, and
using the socio-cultural theory of knowledge we were sort of saying “Well, if
they need to look at and sort of unpack something with functionalism, they
are going to need the language of that, and so the text that they need they
are going to be gathering functionalist discourse as well as learning what it is.
Also, with reflection, if you think about it there’s two voices there - if you are
unpacking your own life, you’re the unpacker, you’re the, the - you’re looking
at this from a perspective of detachment but you’re also looking at yourself.
So really you’ve got self and expert in the text… now, for students that’s a
really difficult thing for them to do. Who is who in the text and of course the
classic question that students ask is ‘do I put ‘I’ in this text?’ ‘Can I write ‘I’ in
this essay?’ And so we’re really going to cope with that idea there. Of
course the expert was going to be the one with the new language. Case and
theory, where do they go? If I put theory first, what does that make me look
like?” “Well, it will make you look more like an expert - if you put yourself first
in the paragraph then you’re going to be coming from that more naive
position. So we were going to talk about that with them. And the
conventions were very much handpicked, particularly for this reflective
exercise, and we looked at normalisations because this is what carries
weight in academic writing, where if you normalise something, you make it
into a thing, a concept, then you can start showing how those concepts are
relating to each other. They might have a cause and effect relationship, they
could have a problem/solution relationship, maybe it’s just sort of a
classification, but they have to be things that can’t be what you ‘do’, ok?
This is one of the very first things we did in class, and it was dealing with the
first criteria, this idea of the sociological imagination, which is really just
looking at the world through the eyes of a sociologist, seeing it the way they
would see it instead of from your own perspective. We started off with these
open prompts where students are just writing stories about themselves so we
asked them, say, “Tell me about a time when you felt nervous”. Or “tell me
about a time when you felt that you changed”. And when they wrote these
narratives, we’d then say to them, “Ok, what we need to do is we need to reimage and re-form things out of your experiences”. And so, as you can see,
that perhaps from this point, from this particular example - a teenager here
where everything changed - is a sense of identity, and a trip to the beach,
they can be seen as employment patterns in Australia. You know, cultural
habits and recreation, again a summer trip, not everybody goes to the beach,
etc etc.
Once we did that, we asked students to rewrite their text, and to use those
conceptual words as sort of, the lynch-pin between the way that the
sentences were going to hang together. And this was a sort of typical
example, where they found the one that was perhaps the most generalised
concept, sense of self, and then they showed the relationship between the
different parts, the different concepts ain that. And this was really just the
first step towards to starting to write outside of their own experiences. So we
6
had a couple of steps in the class for this first partic... this first piece. First of
all, we didn’t just have our theory in our heads and sort of taught to that
pedagogy without the students being any the wiser. We did tell them what
we were doing, we did talk about how the more that they write, and use these
text features, the more they are going to feel part of a certain community and
that was sociology. So we were very explicit about what we were doing, to
the point where we would say, “Well, when you write this sentence, who do
you think you are? Who are you being?” We looked at topic sentences as
things that academics do in order to really break up very dense complex text,
sort of like a ready reckoner - when they read through it they can just read
the first line - do I need that? No, I don’t. Keep going etc, that’s often the way
we read academic texts. And so this idea of reader and writer being very
much interconnected was openly discussed.
We looked at ordering
techniques, and creating these answers to problems, which is something that
academics particularly like to do, build knowledge, create a better world etc,
and the editing and proofreading.
Ok, I’m going to talk about a particular…this is a student who I have called
Mia, and this is how she did it. She was asked the question ‘How do you
think you’ve changed?” And she responded, “Well when I became a mother
of two my life has changed”. This student was a CULD student, so she was…
the English language was not her first language but she did have a good
education in own language. What she does here is that she‘s again got her
narrative and we asked her to open the back of her sociology textbook, you
know, a tome like this with a whole… you know section of, ind... a whole
index of these conceptual words. So she looked up the index and was able
to find conceptual words from that, that she could place against her narrative.
By doing that, she then was able to discuss these with oth... other students
and teachers and just go through her class readings to make sure she had
everything in place, and then she… after a couple of goes wrote this and
followed the same method that we taught where all of those conceptual
words were put in the heading, so that she was telling the reader what she
was going to talk about, then she used the ordering techniques to do that.
As you read you will see that she’s got ‘firstly’, ‘secondly’ and in the final
paragraph, or in the final sentence I should say, she talks about the answer
to this problem that she’s posed. You’ll, you’ll see that there are some
grammar unconventional grammar mistakes there, and this is the typical…
this is actually typical of what remains, I suppose, after we follow this
process, which is why the editing and proofreading at the end is very
important. And when you think about it, academics or writers, when we first
write something for publication or as a report, it’s not that we get it right the
first time. And what we do is we give it to somebody else or we have a look
at it after a little bit and we fix those mistakes. In fact we had an ESL teacher
come in specifically for those sessions just to fix up the grammar, instead of
doing sort of a blanket coverage of grammar that may have had a sort of hitand-miss value, might have been good for a couple of students but possibly
not everybody.
This… once we started to show the steps to the students, we actually looked
at the real assessment and this is where we weren’t making up extra
assessment for our particular study, so they didn’t have extra to do - they had
7
their sociology assessment, we were adjuncts -so we were dealing with that
as well.
This student says “I came from a family of three children; my parents are very
strict. When we grew up and we helped in the house chores at early stage.
And in our family we would look after the parents when they are old. Most
families in my religion look after the old people so we have many children”.
And this was a response to the initial assessment question where she
actually had to write six hundred words on looking at herself from a
functionalist point of view, so we started here. We - following the steps
again and doing the reading, but don’t forget she was also having her
sociology classes at the same time building knowledge there, and the
teachers, being more aware, were also helping with the languages as such,
she wrote “Functionalist like Murdoch believe that children are an investment
in the future. As children mature the economic value of the family is likely to
increase, in my case we were three in the family, we helped in the house
chores at early stage, my parent had expectations that we would support
them when they were old. The reason behind this was mainly because of
our religion, therefore functionalist would agree with the idea of having family
and my children, in my family that it is a big incentive, incentive to a family
thus results to my family being functional in this scenario.”
So what went into this student’s writing? Well, the steps that I was, been
talking about, but the most important thing here is that this student is sending
a clear message that she belongs somewhere. She belongs to some sort of
community, a discourse community the way that we had envisaged it, and
this particular one - sociology - because of the key words ‘functionalism’ etc
there. She’s read functionalist texts, Murdoch etc, but she’s also made some
sort of more generic academic convention moves. She’s not only saying
she’s part of sociology but academia in general, by the fact that she’s
changing her vocabulary from the phrasal verb form to the more Latinised
verb, which we discussed in class. She’s using signalling language – she’s
reaching out to the reader and saying “This is how I want you to read this”, so
she’s actually being quite empowered in her text. And she’s, she’s signalling
that she belongs to a certain club by using academic conventions, not just
referencing - she’s managed to get the technicalities right there but she’s
also being very careful with what she’s saying, she’s being tentative in “This
scenario is likely to…” so she’s not throwing out these generalisations and
saying the world is black and white.
Ok, I’ve talked about how they were doing quite a lot of reading as well, so I
just thought I might mention what we did with the reading in this class,
because texts really held all the keys for these students. When they read
text they weren’t just reading them for knowledge. We didn’t just say “Well,
you know, learn this theory”. These texts were here and written by people
who were potentially in the same club as the one that we were ingratiating
students into. So they were asked to see writers as potential colleagues,
members of the same group, and in this case they were asked to look not
just at the language, sorry… the knowledge… but at the language, and every
time we read texts, we read them in order to harvest, to gather all of these
language and text features that make people soon say, “Oh yes, you belong
to this or that particular area of discourse.” And so annotation was a key
there. We used prompts to tell… to say to the students “Well, when you read
8
something I want you to ask: what is the writer doing right here, right now?
Are they challenging somebody? Are they comparing something?” so
they’re… sort of gathering also ideas about, “Oh, this is what, this what you
do, this is what academics do”, and relating to that.
They were also asked… “Well, if you read this paragraph and it was a book,
what would be the title of this paragraph?” So instead of just saying, “Oh,
what’s the… what’s the main idea here?” they actually had to sort of think
about themselves as if they had written that text as well.
And my personal favourite, and the one that got a quite a few giggles: “If the
writer was in the room right now, what would you say to them?” And this
solicited a really sort of, personal response, but personal in the sense that
they were willing to go head-to-head with the, the writer of this and say “Well,
you know, you can’t write this or you can write this”, or etc etc. They were
talking to or thinking about the writer as part of their discourse community.
The link, the bridge between writing and reading or reading and writing in this
case is often tenuous but what we try to do here is… when they had the sort
of text that they had to write as in an essay, we actually co-authored with our,
our colleagues in sociology, a lot of model texts. And then with those
models, we were able to say “Well, you know this is what we, this is the sort
of thing that people write when they’re in your position, and let’s just have a
look at exactly what they’re doing”, so with a text like this, which is sort of an
essay text, we’d say “Well, we want you to show me, we want you to show us
the words that the writer is using to link the theory to the story, because it’s a
case analysis, ok?
And that’s what you do when you do case analysis - circle all the tentative
language, show me where the writer’s being very careful about what they’re
saying. Also what are the key content words and which sentence is out of
place? So we put in out-of-place sentences there as well. And by this, the
students were able to recognise both the good and the bad in academic
writing. And transfer it and write their own text according to these sorts of,
sorts of knowledges. Shall I keep going?
Speaker 1:
I’ll take over if you like.
Speaker 2:
OK.
Speaker 1:
Thanks, Amanda. Ok, so the combination of… of particularly in this subject,
was an…an essay around argument, which is what students often find so
problematic. I guess one of the side benefits of this process was not just…
well, the progress in writing as you have been able to see, quite complex
writing, but has also introduced the notion that there’s no one single truth or
one reality, which is sort of imperative in community services and social work
etc - community development, where we encouraging a lot of analysis of, of
concept, situations, context, people. So… and being able to, to view multiple
realties and then make sense of those so it actually prepared students very
well for the field, so it wasn’t, we weren’t just preparing them to progress to
higher education cause some of them wanted to graduate with their diplomas
9
and actually practise in the field, it was actually preparing them through
reading and writing text vocationally as well as… starting to build that sort of
critical analysis skills, which we believe’s important in the field. Next one.
Speaker 2:
With the argument - I’ll just continue there - we’d some, in our, in the
academic discourse area, the debate and building knowledge through debate
but ultimately to achieve a sort of consensus, and then if you put that into a
vocational area action, was, I guess, the final thing that we did with them,
and it’s very confronting for the students… it was one of the things that they
were… found the most confronting. So we really wanted to focus on also the
skill of paraphrasing, because when you’re looking or debating in an
academic environment you’re not really putting out your opinion. It’s not like
writing in an opinion piece - it’s really just showing what the moves are, what
the knowledge and the competing knowledges are out there, and being able
to show those and side with one or another, so tentatively putting your own
argument out there, in other words sort of entering a conversation that’s been
going on for some time. So we asked students to… with their topics… to
paraphrase the material that they understood, but that we gave them the
structure of an argument, through a technique that’s come out of the
University of Illinois called ‘Templating’. And that’s when you provide the
signalling language for students and they’re able to make sense of how texts
work structurally, particularly when there are more than one voice in the text.
So you can see that the reading material was paraphrased then inserted at
the end of those templates and from that students were able to structure an
entire argument.
And we found also that, I mean, even though this was an introduction to
argument, that they were able to move out of these templates fairly easily
once they became familiar with the discourse or elements of the - of the
template and of the mode of the engagement, anyway. And also, the one
thing that they found that was… it was… it was quite empowering and it
really maximised this sense of diversity> I guess the way we see it is that
even though these students are coming from very diverse elements there,
sort of, you don’t know who’s in your class sometimes, and I’m sure many of
you experience this -that multi ability in the classroom - you just don’t know
what’s there. But if you can have some sort of unifying idea or concept of
how… where you are bringing students… we just found that was a far better
way to engage and also develop any number of sorts of skills that were out
there and avoid perhaps some of the pitfalls that Angela has talked about
that students were falling in beforehand. We, it really helped us and I guess
we’re here to discuss it with you, and listen to your ideas as well.
Speaker 1:
Good; we’re going to open it up to questions now. But I guess just in
summary it’s just… the… the simple message is it’s really about making
language and discourse explicit - I mean, that’s what it is. And making those
features really explicit to make them more accessible to students who might
have some barriers around finding that accessible, I mean that’s the, that’s
the core sort of practice or technique, I guess. I think that’s all we really
needed to say. We’ve got some references there if you want it… but yeah.
just… if people have questions, I don’t know how long we’ve got.
Speaker 2:
We haven’t got very long.
10
Speaker 1:
About 3 minutes, ok, yes, there’s a big one, a keen one
Question 1:
(Inaudible 38:51 – 38:57) perhaps, would you be willing to come and run
through this workshop, or this session in schools at all?
Speaker 1:
I, well… yeah.
Speaker 2:
We haven’t got it at workshop stage but.
Speaker 1:
But we could.
Question 1:
But your message is very powerful for particularly secondary schools and
schools that I am dealing with.
Speaker 2:
That’s certainly something that we have talked about and that we would
really love to do.
Question 1:
Ok, I will come and see you.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
Yes, come and see us.
Speaker 1:
Any other questions? Sorry we haven’t left you much time… we lost track of it
a bit, yep.
Question 2:
Although it’s not at workshop stage, do you have materials or something
along those lines that could be made available to secondary teachers?
Speaker 1:
We’ve got two venues at the moment, but it’s something that we could
develop and expand, we’ve actually, we’re publishing in, in the, what’s it
called?
Speaker 2:
The International Journal of Educational Research.
Speaker 1:
So, and that, and that gives a bit more of the theoretical and some of the
practical components. We’re also… we do have curriculum material that we
use to sort of sustain it.
Speaker 2:
We have, we actually have quite a large bound copy of the teacher reflection
for this program, that’s being contributed mainly by the language teachers
but also by the sociology teachers. It’s, it’s really just a reflection on what
happened in the class and how students responded. Hints, tips’ all of those
sorts of things and it’s, although it’s sort of semi bound, it needs a little bit of
work but it’s good to know that it could be something that’s useful.
Speaker 1:
That’s useful, and I guess it’s something that we would be very open to
exploring, because we actually believe that, that the, approach has a lot of
application across a range of other sort of levels. So we would be very
happy to create and explore that in more detail. We just applied it to our
group last year and… but there has been a lot of interest in, in the approach,
so that’s why we have sort of tried to get it out there. But certainly we would
be very happy to work with you and also with the School of Education with
11
the previous speakers too, about how we might sort of apply that in school
settings or support you or work with you to sort of tease out the application,
but yeah, happy to present and explore it more fully. Yes.
Question 3:
I just finished year 12 last year and we were given templates to write with but
the examiners, like, they wanted to see different, like, they didn’t want to see
those templates, so there’s like a fine line, I think.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, no, you’re right -there is, I think there, there might, there’s, there are
some differences between writing in VCE and writing through the academic
environment, but you’re right and I think this is part of… once you go beyond
the templates and you become the master of sort of these very structured
things, that’s when you can truly say that, you know, you feel comfortable
with being in that environment. And I am sure I think that’s probably what the
examiners were, were really looking for, but once you go past that structured
sort of thing that you really become master of what you are doing and saying
and writing.
Speaker 1:
That’s a very good point. The templates are a vehicle, they’re not the end,
that’s the intention, so you are actually using the templating and also the lots
of practice and, and lots of exploration with writing and building sort of some,
some bridges, I guess, to actually get to an end point where you actually
become a more confident member of the discourse. And that’s why we did
things like, like that lovely example of “if the writer was in the room”, so
actually putting students on an equal footing almost with that, with that
discourse community instead of seeing them as totally sort of untouchable,
unreachable, but it’s a good point.
Speaker 2:
Thank you.
Speaker 1:
I think we need to let you go.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Is that right?
Speaker 2:
Thank you very much everybody.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for paying attention.
Speaker 2:
Thanks.
End of presentation.
For more information about the topics discussed in this podcast, please visit the Department
for Education and Early Childhood Development’s website education.vic.gov.au.
12