Jan 29
You’ll have to blame Tony Loughland and Barry Manilow for that awfully punsy, a touch sexist and inappropriate title. But there is a little bit in it. The crying part. As a PhD student scraping for every dollar I am one of the tutors in a unit called Understanding Teachers’ Work here at my alma …
Apr 05
Meet ‘Ricky’. He is Aboriginal, Noongar his people. He’d be a poster boy for many of the statistics and labels entrenched in public psyche about this group of people, particularly when young – low literacy, poor school attendance, lazy, the only good thing he can do is kick a footy, use hands, drawing and art …
Nov 01
This is ‘Billy’. He is 15. He allowed me to post this photo of him from a visit to the local animal centre yesterday. This is one of my favourite photos. It means so much. A couple of months ago, Billy was in a bad, dark space where no young person (or adult for …
Oct 19
Yesterday, I stopped at traffic lights and watched an angry old man telling off a kid of about 16 trying to eke a few cents by washing windows. I’m sure you’ve seen the sight alike. Shoulders dropped, expletives exchanged, and move on – to my car. I wound the window down to tell him that …
Jan 07
Now on the new site, I am re-posting something I wrote as a catharsis in 30 minutes, a year and a half ago. This is the post I am most fond and proud of, and has always reminded me of two things: why do we teachers (with an ed-tech bend) do the things we do …
Dec 10
Today, 10 December, is the International Human Rights Day. I could not help but share this great clip on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I have shown this in class many times and had some great conversations with kids around it. I hope you do too. Let’s not just imagine, let’s do! Be the …
Nov 12
This week, I showed the series of classic clips ‘A Class Divided‘ in my Philosophy & Ethics class. At certain points I paused the clips and asked questions like: Does this sound familiar? Is this you? Anyone you know? And pennies dropped… I wanted to show that fighting any form of discrimination (in this case …
Nov 07
‘Pray to Play’ Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannynorton/228708030/in/photostream/) This is the second post with a particular theme in the series “Why is everyone an expert of education?“. The series is written collaboratively by Ira Socol, Dr Greg Thompson and Tomaz Lasic. In the previous post, we have looked at the seductive, yet problematic, empirical, scientific ‘breaking down’ of …
Sep 24
This is the first post with a particular theme in the series “Why is everyone an expert of education?“. The series is written collaboratively by Ira Socol, Dr Greg Thompson and Tomaz Lasic. Science is an awesome, admirable pursuit of measurable, testable, replicable truth. It is a pursuit of certainty that something has, does and …
Sep 18
Image Source: Tyack, David (1974). The One Best System. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page 286 (Thank you Jon Becker!) Everyone is an expert on education and its particular, dominant subset – school. Everyone who has either attended school, taught at school, had their kids at school, managed school, funded school, even avoided school knows …
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