Category: edci532

The Pair

Our pair’s outcomes in the Remote Teacher Resources website addresses the immediate need of teachers: the ability to generate class content that assists and encourages learning and the ability to curate (select, organize and exhibit) online class resources to foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs. Included in these abilities were the need to identify appropriate technologies, to predict difficulties students would have accessing the technology as well as the content and address these concerns, to construct interactive materials, to differentiate through the materials, and to design a variety of static and interactive tools for students to access both synchronously and asynchronously. A final aspect of the creation and curation of content was to be able to evaluate student learning.

Our resource activity included a large array of selected applications for a variety of methods of creating and curating content as well as suggestions on how to evaluate curated resources. Our posts directed readers to posts from other members of our cohort who focused on accessibility, communication between various stakeholders, and wellness. Included in our personal posts were examples of both created and curated content for students: a two-day lesson plan of created and curated resources, two curated resource pages, and a description of how those resources were evaluated. These examples are evidence of achieving the goal of having generated good class content and curated resources, and the reader can compare their materials to these exemplars. The current site, generated in a short period of time, is still rough around the edges but has some great content.

The Cohort

A focus on Ted Aoki’s lived curriculum is part and parcel of our group’s created resource. We have not created a traditional curriculum document; we provide no position of power by stating what must be done. Our cohort is providing content which the student has a choice in how they will explore and how they will utilize the information inside their own practices, choosing as much or as little as they can manage to master. In our own way we have provided a resource where we are not requiring teachers to participate in a set way and order, but we are responding to a need of teachers responding to the pandemic’s teaching requirements. We are not face-to-face with the teachers, but our narrative will provide teachers with the opportunity to live in the moment between our curriculum-as-plan with its numerous outcomes, and the curriculum in which they will live (Aoki, 1993).

By creating this resource as a list of resources and then a created resource based on those resources, we have a significant hidden curriculum. Our unwritten, unofficial, lessons, values, and perspectives are about how teachers should interact with students, other teachers, and their students’ families. The ideas and behaviors that we consider acceptable are obvious from what is included on the site. The framework of the curriculum we have created is fluid, and our positions as teacher and students are interchangeable as we contributors can learn from the site, other teachers (our ‘students’) can learn and can also contribute through comments, interaction, and requests to have their posts linked. The role of teacher and student is re-visioned (Nahachewsky and Slomp, 2009) and this is probably the main point of our hidden curriculum; the teacher is not the ‘sage on the stage’ but is the facilitator.

The Community

We have stretched our digital resource further than the resources referenced in Nahachewsky and Slomp’s (2009) article, as our digital classroom has little formal interaction. Our site recognizes creating a community in the digital classroom is extremely important as is evidenced by the number of posts on community and communication. Through linking to other blogs and sites, we hope to raise the site’s level in search engines so a community can be established. I, for one, also plan to encourage use of this site with my International Baccalaureate colleagues. Our hope is that having comments allowed on the blog posts and enabling connections with Twitter will encourage some real community, but it will depend on how well the site is utilized.

For many Indigenous peoples, community is at the centre of interactions (Donald, 2009). Our site’s focus on community and communication is a hidden curriculum on ways to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing. Focusing on the community and building up each other rather than competition for the ‘highest grade’ or getting done first becomes more possible in the digital classroom where asynchronous work takes place and where student ability to monitor others’ progress is limited. Students are put into a situation to learn and seek ‘wisdom’ where they can – internet, books, each other, teacher . . . According to Donald (2009), one of the most important ways to foster ethical educational space is through work that requires human connectivity as a critical starting point.

As we are not a large group of people and our time for post creation is short, there are some missing elements from the entire website, including specific posts on how to include Indigenous content authentically, how to fully incorporate First Peoples Principles of Learning, how to encourage inquiry and how to address motivation and self-management, although there is some reference to most of these elements in the site. I am hoping more posts will be written to address the missing issues.

References

Aoki, T. T, (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3). 255-268.

Donald, D. T. (2009). The curricular problem of Indigenousness: Colonial frontier logics, teacher resistances, and the acknowledgment of ethical space. In J. Nahachewsky & I. Johnston (Eds.), Beyond ‘presentism’: Re-imagining the historical, personal, and social places of curriculum (pp.23-41). Sense Publishers.

First Nations Education Steering Committee. (2015, September). First Peoples Principles of Learning. [Poster]. http://www.fnesc.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PUB-LFP-POSTER-Principles-of-Learning-First-Peoples-poster-11×17.pdf

Nahachewsky, J. & Slomp, D. (2009) Sound and Fury: Studied response(s) of curriculum and classroom in digital times. In J. Nahachewsky & I. Johnston (Eds.), Beyond ‘presentism’: Re-imagining the historical, personal, and social places of curriculum (pp.139-151). Sense Publishers.

For May, June and July, I was/am both taking online courses/workshops on teaching using technology (4 in total) and facilitating 2 online workshops.

I took an online MOOC on Indigenous Perspectives that was quite old-fashioned in its approach. It had recorded video lectures with limited inclusion of pictures or text, so it made a great podcast listening experience. At the end of each of the sections was a downloadable reading on the topic (and the closed caption was also copying) as well as a short quiz for checking your understanding. Not my favourite format, but the material was interesting and even thought-provoking at times. I wished it had a little more variety than one person lecturing or a guest speaker being interviewed.

My second course was a workshop facilitated by two leaders from the International Baccalaureate. It was on facilitating IB’s online workshops, which are already set up with an informational slideshow presentation and required learning engagements. As a facilitator, you are allowed to customize somewhat within the Moodle platform, but they want evidence of learning basically through forums. They are encouraging the use of Padlet, FlipGrid, Bubble, MindMeister, VoiceThread and Google Docs. Our workshop also encouraged us to branch out to other apps as we saw fit, but it was interesting to note that the experienced online educators, when we shadowed them, were mostly only making use of the old-fashioned forums. The use of Big Blue Button (a video meeting tool, BBB) was just being released as part of the platform, so June/July participants have access to it but since their workshops started earlier in May, our workshops appeared to be the first ones with access to BBB.

My two university courses are run by an extremely experienced online educator and a less experienced online educator. They are using Slack (communication tool), WordPress (website tool), Zoom (video conferencing), Google Docs, Calendly (appointment tool) and we also have access to BlueJeans to meet in pairs or pods. They are having online drop-in office hours and offering to meet one-on-one. Both are being amazingly available even though they are balancing other university duties as well as working from the midst of their families (and the issues all that entails). This really pointed out the lack of instructor availability in my other two courses, so there was limited ability to clarify difficulties.

I have been working on my Google Trainer certification so I provided a workshop for an elementary school on the use of Google Classroom. Some of the participants had never heard of the program although they were in a Google for Education school and some had used it for a couple of years, so I set up a classroom with a little over 20 assignments that went from very basic to how to teach yourself new things. Teachers had two hours to interact with the materials while I sat in a Google Meet. Some needed some help just starting up their classroom and in most cases, my instructions were clear enough that teachers could start using their room. I was busy clarifying during the two hours and spent another few hours in the evening responding to all my assignments.

My other online offering is an IB Mathematics workshop for teachers just starting to teach in the programme. I gave them all my email and my phone number although they can also contact me through the moodle platform (which has a 15 minute delay in sending emails). I provided an email with some tech tutorials before they started and those tutorials are also linked in the platform. All the forums they are to contribute to have been started and some useful tech options have been included. I have had participants email me, text me, phone me, WhatsApp me and contact me through the platform, with some of these contacts trying to arrange a face-to-face in the BBB room. I had hoped to have some teaching time in the BBB, but trying to organize a meeting with 24 people 2, 3, 8, 9, 14 and 15 hours ahead of you is extremely difficult. Instead I have tried daily office hours, spread out at different times each day according to what looked good based on a Doodle poll. I reach out to the group weekly, every couple of days to individuals who are posting, and weekly to individuals who are not actively completing learning engagements. Between the office hours and private meetings, I have met half of the participants in the video room and the course is 3/4 done.

What do I see while experiencing online learning as a student and a teacher simultaneously.

• instructors are struggling with the new technologies even in courses that have always been online as those courses are integrating even more interactive tools.
• students/teachers are struggling to learn all the new interactive tools and often just want to have an old-fashioned talk through of what they need to learn and/or how to use the technology.
• students want to have variety without being overwhelmed and everyone’s level of overwhelmed is different, so options are important.
• students want community, but they want it immediate, so if the instructor does not reach out and try build that community, it won’t happen.

SO, what does burning the candle at both ends show me? KEYs for success are:

• Instructor availability for some face-to-face instruction
• Clear written instructions
• A reasonable amount of tech with tutorials available
• Consistent reaching out to individual students personally will make it easier for them to reach out to you when they need it, even if they are not reaching out to each other. The instructor has to be the starter.

Looking at these requirements, I am worried about instructor burnout as our teachers go online this fall without proper support in many cases.

For me, as a teacher, curriculum is like planning and hosting a wedding. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of ‘curriculum’ is “the courses offered by an educational institution” and of ‘wedding’ is “a marriage ceremony usually with its accompanying festivities”. They are extremely broad definitions and present the idea of one constant in each situation; in a curriculum there is education involved, and in a wedding some formal ritual occurs. You expect that there are a number of elements that could take place in some fashion:

Creating a guest list = creating a learning community
Wedding ceremony with Canadian legal requirements and possibly church requirements (yes, the church encourages that there be a community witnessing) = the prescribed provincial/state requirements including testing with the possibility of some other curriculum included (such as the International Baccalaureate)
The schedule of events (ceremony, reception, meal, dance, party, etc.) = the learning experiences planned
Speeches = Feedback
Wedding pictures = documentation of achievements, learning experiences, feedback, and celebration of learning.
Guests gathering and interacting = Group work and interactions between learners and teachers

Bare Bones

Many people do not consider everything I included in my list as part of curriculum. Egan defines curriculum as the study of any and all educational phenomena. Yet you need to know your guests/learners in order to effectively plan and present your wedding/curriculum. The legal bare bones is that you can be married with only 2 witnesses. Many people consider a particular textbook or the ministry guidelines to be the curriculum. As a trained teacher, you need to take those bare bones and create something that will engage your learners and encourage them to be involved – how many weddings are planned where people only attend the oath-taking part of the ceremony and none of the festivities? Curriculum as a document should be a basic list of topics, subject skills and soft skills that can be adapted to the context of a classroom situation just as a wedding has to be carried out with just the legal requirements. Too much prescription is not useful, but too much vagueness is also useless. From the view of the learners/guests, there needs to be much more than these bare bones.

Filling the Frame

Planning a wedding for my daughter and her partner and the limited Covid guest list was very different than the original plan for a larger guest list which would be very different from the wedding Joanna and her partner planned for June 30th as opposed to the wedding they had planned for April. Yet, no matter how much you plan and think ahead of possible alternatives, the reality will be slightly different. The same goes in the classroom. I have taught private music students as well as in schools for over thirty years and although some of the high school and middle school math, information processing, band, choir and Christian ethics (with a smattering of science and accounting thrown in) were the exact same courses, I cannot say they were presented the same or even covered the exact same concepts or learning objectives. You can plan and postulate, but when you get your ‘guests’ in front of you, the ‘atmosphere’ affects what can be accomplished. The context affects the presentation of the content. I found there was an equal amount of similarity between years of teaching the same course as there was between teaching the same year of students from Saskatchewan to British Columbia curriculum (which granted, was similar for mathematics and music but wildly out of date in a variety of ways for information processing/design courses). Even our well-planned wedding celebration changed significantly due to drizzling rain and the relaxed nature of our guests. We were able to incorporate some of the frame while making a consistent effort to remove and edit the parts of it that were not working for us, just the way you need to work a curriculum according to Blades.

For me, hosting a wedding or presenting a curriculum needs to include a flexible plan so reaction to the immediate context is possible. You do not want to lose the voices of your guests or your students because this diminishes their joy and engagement in the experience.

Resources

Blades, D. (1997) Procedures of Power in a Curriculum Discourse: Conversations from Home. JCT, 11(4), 125-155

Egan, K. (2003) What is Curriculum? Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(1), 9-16.