Some Thoughts

By: Jacob Rodenburg

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Here are some excerpts from my jounal entries.

The link between feelings and thought has encouraged me to think about teacher-researcher collaboration. The process of collaboration is a life skill. It evolves out of mutual respect, careful listening and reiteration, out of empathy and sensitive yet critical thought. Connelly and Clandinin wrote persuasively about the importance of collaboration; Cochram-Smith addressed the process of collaboration in a little more detail. But if meaningful collaboration is going to occur between teachers and teachers, researchers and teachers, administrators, researchers and teachers, people will have to be conscious of the elements that make for effective collaboration. Especially given the power inequities and the politics that Connelly and Clandinin discuss in their chapter Collaborative Research.

How do we create an atmosphere where personal experiences are valid and important even if they do not come with a doctorate in education? How do we encourage educators to really feel for what others are experiencing and saying, to listen to build rather than listen to criticize? Can true collaboration occur in workplaces with unbalanced power structures? I think part of the answer to these questions may be found in an educational system that values collaboration. Collaboration should be part of learning in schools from an early age through to teacher's college and beyond. It is an integral and essential part of learning.

To continue with my feeling begets thought theory, the importance of empathy and understanding cannot be over- emphasized. If you don't know the feelings behind the thoughts, the passion driving the inquiry, you haven't understood the point. Good collaboration depends on this. Can there be meaningful change in education without good collaboration on all fronts?

I say all this because I worry that we are becoming disconnected to place. Modern development homogenizes the land. The grey limestone of Kingston gives way to the suburbs and the strip malls, the aluminum warehouses that could be Anywhere, Canada or America for that matter. The flavour of Kingston, what historically grew out of the buildings, the land and the forces that shape both, are eroding away. We seem to be loosing a sense of what this place is.

As a nature educator, I have to teach out of a sense of place. I used to think that letting the kids know what was in a natural area would be enough. [There is a blackcapped chickadee, they travel in small flocks of up to 12 birds. There is a dominant male and female who usurp the other birds at the feeders. They have several calls, one of which is a contact call, the familiar "chick-a-dee-dee". Lets move along please.] I didn't realize that I had paraphrased a bird book. This was knowledge without context, without a place to hang what was known on. But what about this place, what have the birds done here? What are the stories that give this place a context?

And there was my mini-revelation. If I want children to connect to the land in a meaningful way, I have to give them the opportunity to know this land as a place. Like the characters in a story, they have to know some of the living things in this community as unique and irreplaceable. If I speak of this place in generalities what more are they going to learn but generalities?

We know this place through the living and non-living things that reside here. There is a form and a process which conjoin the living and the non-living in a ceaseless dance. For thousands of years we have communicated process and form in a way which could be best understood by our sons and daughters. We told stories.

Each story emerged from our cultural, religious and practical knowledge of the land. Each story became known to the next generation and retold, perhaps changed, perhaps not. But each was listened to carefully because the stories offered an understanding of the land that went beyond explanation. Neil Evernden, in The Natural Alien writes, The presence of explanation, even anticipated explanation, transforms experience from wonder to quizzical bemusement or indifference. Stories are rich in metaphor, cultu ral context, social context, physical context, mystery and analogue. And so, when I take children for a walk in a natural area, I want them to know of this place and the stories that are here. From the old elm that toppled over, to the woodpecker that carved oblong holes in its bark. From the glaciers that scratched their way over the limestone to the little chipmunk that lost its babies last year. I want to tell my stories of what I have come to know of this place. And through exploration and discovery, I hope the children will look about them with enough wonder to be a ble to find their own stories and come to know this place.

Learning goes so much beyond the products demanded by educational institutions. And yet these are the yardsticks we are always being measure against. Some of us have fallen painfully short of what was required and have suffered as a result. Both Paul and I have had major difficulties with institutional learning and only lately have learned not to jump through hoops and still pursue learning paths that are important to us but not institutionally acknowledged. We realize that is likely the case with most learners. We both wonder how to value all learning.

Learning occurs through serendipitous moments with friends along the hallways of school, in pubs after class, in readings completely unrelated to classroom work, in sudden flashes of insight at night (these are unfortunately rare for me). Most teachers, I believe, would have little difficulty in admitting that a significant portion of our learning occurs outside the structures of education.

If we are, as Paul claims, the best experts of our own thoughts and the best experts of how we learn, how can teachers make room for other aspects of our learning to be recognized? The answer I think, is in line with what you have been doing Tom. You invite people to tell you about what they have learned in their writing folders. The writing folders become a forum for all learning. I begin to see the value and importance of this tool. For the writer, painful as it may sometimes be, writing becomes a way of processing and synthesizing thoughts, a way to indicate what has been learned and what has been meaningful. Paul and I have realized that unless you link learning to meaning, you will never truly have learned. Meaning making does not come from the institution, rather it comes from personal reflection. Where is the room for personal reflection in most of schooling? In my experience, it was relegated to the back seat, behind the tests I wrote and the assignments I completed, to somewhere in English cl ass. Only then were my thoughts, impressions, feelings (my meaning) invited. And only briefly, tucked somewhere behind the "real learning".

So thank you Tom for inviting our thoughts. They have not come easily for me, nor have they likely been easy for the my classmates. It is amazing how often I have gone back to my journal entries to help me clarify and work through the bombardment of impressions, facts, interactions, readings, discussions, feelings that make up this place we call school. I just hope I can find the wherewithal to continue my journal entries after your class.....