Learning Journal

I’m not sure how useful the early-morning session on aims and objectives was. I’m quite sure that all it did for me was highlight the use of obfuscatory language in official teaching documents that covers up the increasing distance between teachers and what they teach, and the students who come to them for learning. But maybe I’m just awkward.
This awkwardness will proceed apace throughout this week’s reflective proceedings, because I am going to reflect upon reflection - perhaps someone somewhere has called this meta-reflecting - and create one of those awful mirror-in-front-of-mirror scenarios in which you notice the ugliness of the back of your own head.

Anyway.

Teaching psychology at A-Level is requiring me to learn things that I hadn’t covered in my degree. Looking over books that I read at the first year of my university studies has been nostalgic, and in this case useful. One simplifies social constructionism, breaking it down into personal identity, power, and narrative.
Applying this to our reflective journaling is edifying. If we see the practice of keeping such a journal through social constructionist theory, it can be understood as a practice of constructing a personal identity through narrative. In this sense, we continually update our ‘teacher selves’ through the imposition of hindsight onto past events and our feelings of them at the time, evaluating and concluding in order to bring about a change in our future reaction to events, our current feelings (especially negative ones), and also in our ‘selves’, especially that bit which we use within teaching contexts.
All well and good - but it is never good practice for a critical (‘Foucauldian’) psychologist to examine use of discourse and leave out power. How might this enter into the mix?
As far as I can imagine, the sharing of journals with mentor and later with one’s STE group leads to a pressure to self-censor. One’s own history becomes a field of omission and recreation, where feelings on the past are reconstructed to be palatable to others. As an example, it might be hard for many to write “Jason was a little ‘melon-farmer’ in class yesterday,” knowing that one’s peers would be peering at it. Yet this statement might be used in, for example, a staffroom or in informal conversation. (And I’ll tell you more about the staffroom next week, Dear Journal.)
This is not the extent of the matter, however. The pressures are more than just anti-salacious, but also professional. In the interests of being seen to ‘develop’, it is needed to maintain a ‘constructive’ and perhaps ‘empathetic’ (mmm… pathetic) view. What if this is not how you feel? Then, perhaps, you lie. The pressure would certainly be there - to appear to keep to certain standards. In this sense latent power relations and normative influences are at work, which requires us to restructure and reconstruct one’s own past experience. If the self is ‘socially constructed’, this may then have effects in making one’s future thoughts meet these assumed targets of professionalism. Not that this would affect everyone, some will know exactly what they are doing and understand it as a language game of cynical lies to appear as an effective and reflective (re-eff(l)ective) teacher. It will affect some, however.
I’m quite sure that Dewey did not think that this would happen. Perhaps he imagined a less regulated form of education, where reflective practice would be a foundation for the sharing of experience and a site for collective wisdom. But in the modern setting of FE institutions the teacher’s ability to change situations seems to have diminished, and the reflective journal - seen in a critical light - could be a way of reconstructing the past to make it seem as if things can be done by the teacher about circumstances we really cannot change, and eventually reconstructing the teacherself to take on personal responsibility for social, cultural, and political problems.
My first observation went well. I still have some reservations about managing the class ‘effectively’, from what I recall of 6th form being coerced into working has the effect of making one look wearily busy for a little while. To me, it seems obvious that the student who comes into class might not be interested in learning for all sorts of reasons, reasons that may not be addressable within that space and time. Real ‘classroom management’ should actually happen in everywhere but there, a formative discovery process enacted in all people’s lives before they even step into a college. The answers to the question ‘why don’t they want to learn’ lie in a complex history of social and meaning interrelationships that extend far past the immediately graspable now. All I can do in the now is to tidy up the scraggy ends, cosmetic enhancements to hide the problems of education.

My first weeks of teaching. And what can I say? Successions of late nights to learn what I am going to be teaching, devising handouts, and then rushing in to college to photocopy them before lesson takes a mighty load of work. Yet I'm not sure for what. I wonder if it is best to teach people in institutions, or whether real learning is actually taking place. I feel as if I am forcing my students' heads full of EdExcel's bland and ever-reformulated porridge of knowledge, just so they can be summatively assessed and gain a grade to help them get into the heavingly unhappy HE sector. I don't feel that I am allowed my students to expand or adapt, or to learn anything they can fit into their lives, or anything they will really remember after a few years. The purpose isn't for them to learn, or for me to teach, but for them to pass an exam. Everything they learn is a tiny unit-within-a-unit, a piece of knowledge reduced to a Lego brick. They have to comprehend, say, Levels of Processing, so it is described to them, a few studies that support or deny it covered, and then there is an evaluation of the theory. Where is the time for them to appreciate what it is, to fit it into how they think? To think at all? It is a constant round of description followed by questions followed by description. The student's job is always to fit themselves around what they have been given - whether I teach them by whiteboard, OHT, handout, or ask them to read the textbooks - rather than fit it to them. It is hard to know how to teach best within the framework I have been given, or how to address individual needs. The needs that are most paramount are those of EdExcel, who set the curriculum and define the content, aims, and objectives. Everything beneath them must conform to their unquestionable standards, and the exact fault in these standards is never found because they change every year.
Accordingly, these past weeks have helped me to discover the truth of Bertrand Russell’s statement, at the frontispiece of Kelly’s The Curriculum: Theory and Practice, that “the teacher, like the artist, the philosopher and the man of letters, can only perform his work adequately if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.” Only this sort of teacher, the 'man' of letters, can impart a freedom of thought to 'his' students. (Wasn't sexism rife back then? Gosh.)
Many people, so I have heard, have at some point received advice from their mentors to not come and teach in the FE sector. It does seem to be a profession that receives much criticism from all quarters, without much in the way of spirited defence. Certainly the job of the college teacher / lecturer is difficult and involves a lot of planning. Without a doubt, there is much to consider about teaching adults - their differing motivations, their different backgrounds, how to address their needs. Teaching children may be in many ways similar, but to accommodate the needs of mature students seems to me to be even more diverse. Yet there are more than just these practical impracticalities.
Rather than the problem being the mass of time-consuming botherations, the whole FE sector has been steadily gripped, vice-like, in the dominating clasp of a point-scoring politic. Problems need to be solved - often problems created only a short while ago by other ‘solutions’ - and before you know it those at the end of the compulsory sector and the beginning of the FE sector have a lot more to worry about. Between the glamorous bits, we fight two actions at once - one to fulfill the needs of the school leaver, the other to fulfill the needs of the university goer. How can this be done at the same time as laying down the curriculum?
My colleagues have readily-expressed notions that it used to be better. When they started out, there was a reason to choose to teach in college. There was self-direction, there was optimism, and there was the feeling of a chance to ‘make a difference’. Where has all this gone?
I am not faced with self-direction, optimism, all the feeling that I can make a difference. I am faced with untidy groups of people who have to learn a mass of material to pass modular tests, scared more than anything else that they will miss out on the grades they need to get onto the courses they want, already sick in worry over debt, and unwilling to contemplate the possibilities of a life of work like that of their parents’. My aim is not so much to teach as to race through drills, supplemented by regular and cheerless handouts, training them in the repetition of phrases and ideas.
I’m not sure that learning is best done in institutions. Knowledge is not institutionisable. To take it apart to make it small enough to fit through the school doors is to take away its soul. To make the student small enough to fit through is to take away the entire of their lives - to ask them to be nothing more than learning machines, divulged of opinions or beings. Some guy studied American colleges for fifteen years and discovered that good learning involves a progression through an epistemological hierarchy. First one believes that knowledge is a duality - what is right, and what is wrong. Slowly, one’s view becomes more complex, until the scary post-modern fragmentation of perspectives can be comprehended by the student - the liberal arts view of pluralism, with all the equal opportunities and so on that this requires.
This progression is not at all present in college. One word - the teacher’s - is listened to, and the student that is not listening is deficient. It seems like a regression into a didactic past.

Stevie Wonder is excellent.
Mmm. I have a generally positive experience to report this time, although it is studded with challenge and etc. First off, the microteaching was smashing. I really wanted to have some more time to do the subject justice, and to allow a longer gestation period (more than half a second) after each question for multiple times. It would have been lovely to see the concepts and understandings grow as I went through the material. But in ten minutes you sometimes have to just plough through it. And the session did not just provide some experience of teaching, it also showed how many different ways there are to teach and construct lessons. It seems that I definitely prefer a more process-and-development concept of education and the curriculum in general, implying a constructivist / constructionist theory of knowledge - and the conflicts with this and established practice will be discussed later.
My college placement has been continuing well, with seven observations all done and another pebble of assessment being lifted off of my bouldersome burden. It was somewhat troubling when, at the end of one lesson as the students gleefully toddled out, the teacher turned to me and said, "When you take this class next week, I'll need you to cover cognitive-development in four sessions". The sheer scale of what I need to do is pretty heartstopping. But, I'm being given all the support a trainee teacher could expect, along with a back-breakingly massive amount of resources, teacher help packs and so on. The EdExcel curriculum is very much content based, with clear aims and objectives ("understand two assumptions of cognitive psychology") that lead on to similarly phrased exam questions. In this sense, it's much easier, as I'm being told exactly what to teach and being given plenty of ways how by the literature. At the same time, though, this is pretty much against my own convictions, so it seems up to me to do things differently. All the other teachers have mentioned to me how long they've been working, how tired they are, how they just amass handouts and videos around themselves so they can do lessons without any thought or planning - and how they're looking forward to 'new input' to 'shake things up' (perhaps the first shake should be to get out of such an utterly defined curriculum). The major challenge for me will not be to follow EdExcel's path - a toothless chimp with irritable bowel syndrome could do that - but to find ways to foster some learning development in the students as they receive the tiny smartbombs of knowledge dictated by the content and laser-directed by aims.
P.T.O
Summerhill school is interesting, isn't it? I've been reading a little about Bowles and Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America and thinking about Summerhill in the same way. Although the idea of a 'correspondence' between mandatory schooling and capitalist society structuring consciousness is too simple an explanation, endorsement of certain beliefs and behaviours are definitely part of normal curricula. Summerhill uses a democratic structure - the problem being that this structure is not present in our 'democracies', where decisions and the information used to make decisions are much more controlled. I wonder how the students who come out of the school deal with the world outside, when it is so fundamentally different and their voice counts so much less. Do they come out thinking that they should be active in transforming politics and society somehow to become democratic, or do they believe that the world is somehow sick and democracy will not or can not work? I guess that I am concerned that another Leo Strauss will appear somewhere, having diagnosed all problems as emanating from the values of liberal society and seeking to remedy them with the potent myths of the state and the leader.