'Building Schools Where Everyone Understands that Each Member is a Gift'

Anyone who has been a teacher will testify that at times there have been children who were hard to like. I was one of those children for a number of my teachers. What about you? Can you recall students who were challenging and difficult to like? Perhaps ask yourself why they were hard to like?

 

Towards the end of my book 'Education and Pedagogy for Life', I suggest that one of the key marks of the good teacher is they are attentive to all their students. Note 'ALL'! What's more, they encourage students to tolerate one another, not simply those in their friendship groups. Community building in school is very important, and the best teachers will shape class and group communities to help students understand in some way, that every other student is a gift to all of us in a classroom.

 

Life is filled with many relationships, and each contributes to us in some way. We learn and grow in and out of school as we experience life together in varied communities of practice. School should not be seen as a place to which we simply send our children in order to have their heads filled with knowledge, and discipline instilled. Hopefully, we want them to grow in understanding and character. This requires "immersion in a life that is only partly lived at school... our students have complex lives in which they dwell in numerous communities of practice."  (Cairney, 2018, p.164).

 

The Christian school is to be a place where our students' presuppositions are challenged constantly, as they try to grapple with the experiences of life. Ricoeur ('Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination', 1995) reminds us that all of life impacts us, and our presuppositions are challenged daily. This includes the things taught in classes or the school Chapel, as well as ideas expressed by students in community life, playground conversations etc. 

Ricoeur suggests that as faith emerges, it will be challenged as we try to make sense of changed priorities and lives. How do we do this? He argues that "metaphorical imagination" is strongly implicated in such efforts to make sense of varied realities. My take on this is that as we encounter conflicts between the things we believe and value, we will need to reconcile such clashes by creating inner 'metaphors' to hold them in balance, rather than in tension. 

 

As a student comes to faith in our schools or begins to reflect more critically on the faith of other students, and also their own, they have the need to reconcile inner conflicts. They observe and listen to others and ask questions of them. But they also ask questions of themselves as they carry many inner conflicts alone.

Ricoeur's take on this is that for such inner conflicts, we can experience redemption by imagining the possibilities if we were to move in new directions in life. He suggests that by "imagining his possibilities, man (sic) can act as a prophet of his own experience." While I agree that at the point of key decisions about our faith and where we stand in a community like a Christian school, I also see the growth or loss of faith in our students as much more deeply interwoven with all of life. Bad life examples and good ones, all play their part.

God reveals himself in many ways within school communities. For the teacher, I suggest "the things we teach, the priorities we set, the activities we plan, the experiences that are structured, the books we share; indeed all of life in and outside the school acts upon us and shapes us" (Cairney, p.166).

For the student, this will often be the examples of teachers and students. This is demonstrated in their lives; the priorities they hold, the things they believe and so on. 

Christian schools exist to reveal God in every aspect of life. We are seeking to shape young lives for the good. Buber reminds us that teachers present a "selection of the world" to our students with formation of character as the key purpose. But every member of our school communities is used by God and plays their part.

As I say many times in my writings, the calling to be a teacher is an honorable one. We have the opportunity to help shape hearts and minds; we are vehicles for learning about God and revealing God through his word and our witness. We must continue to meditate on this truth. What a responsibility! But in his strength and power all things are possible.

'Little People's Literacy Learning' - A New Resource

While this is a blog linked closely to my book 'Pedagogy & Education for Life', I thought readers might also appreciate seeing a free online resource that I co-wrote with a colleague. It was designed for a broad audience - all preschool parents and carers. It's FREE!

I co-wrote this online preschool support program for parents of children 0-4 years with Anita Ayre. It was released in 2018 but has been upgraded with 6 new modules. The Australian Literacy Educators Association has just uploaded the latest modules in this free online program. No catch, just free support and practical ideas for new parents not sure how to help their children to learn.

This support program started out with my co-author Anita Ayre preparing activities for her daughter to support her first child (i.e. Anita's grandchild). I was asked to partner with her to develop this online program for parents and grandparents. 

The resource program is available FREE via the 'Australian Literacy Educators Association' website. It is called 'Little People's Literacy Learning: A guide for engaging parents and carers'. It offers practical help for parents and carers of children aged 0-5. Did I say that it's FREE. No catches. You don't need to be a member of ALEA to access the resource. It is open to all.

The guide was launched in 2018 for parents and carers and comes with hundreds of activities that you can enjoy with your child. Initially, there were 17 units. Now it has grown to 27 with new modules on 'Maths', 'Maths Language', 'Technology Use', 'Measurement', 'Space' and 'Pattern' just released. The modules will help parents to use simple activities as part of life. Some are incidental and others have some limited planning required. But all you need to know is explained in the modules. All activities are designed with an emphasis on learning through collaborative play and shared discovery. Why are so many of the recent modules related to maths? Because language and literacy have many important relationships to these topics.

Student Formation: Avoiding the Indoctrination Trap

I often hear parents make statements like: "I just want my children to grow up to be the person they want to be." This seems a rather risky approach to parenting. From birth, parents of all faiths and none, are trying to 'shape' or 'form' their children in specific ways. Some may deny this, but it is true.

While this is all within an envelope of love and devotion for most parents, there is a very practical component to parenting. Being a good parent requires you to teach your children many things. It begins early with language and practical skills like sitting unaided, crawling and eventually walking.

All seemingly natural processes. But in reality, parents coax and assist as children take risks and take on new challenges. The popular term for this adult support is 'Scaffolding' (a term from Russian pyschologist Lev Vygotsky). In this way, parents and teachers help children to do things with our assistance that they cannot do alone. The picture opposite of my wife helping our daughter to walk aged about 12 months is an example.

However, as children grow physically and intellectually, there comes a point (or more likely many points) where children challenge the 'authority' of parents to 'help'. "No!" Or, "I do it this way Daddy" should be familiar to any parent. Later, the Tween or teenager will simply think they (or their friends) know better.

How parents deal with growing independence is one of the great challenges and skills of parenting. Children fairly quickly learn that parents have expectations and try to place limits on their behaviour. In response, they begin to test the boundaries, to see what they can get away with. Increasingly, as children enter school and spend more time away from parents, they need to make judgements about how they act, what they believe, and how to judge right and wrong - without you being present! This is a hard time for most Christian parents.

How do we deal with this emerging independence? What's more, how does a teacher deal with this within their classes? What beliefs, values, ideas and teachings do we privilege? There are many responses from parents and teachers that range from a 'hands off' response that allows great freedom for children to work things out themselves, to more extreme forms of indoctrination. Christian schools face this dilemma each day. In fact, even non-Christian schools face this dilemma, even though few recognise it.    

Elmer Thiessen in his book 'Teaching for Commitment' has some helpful comments on the difference between open-mindedness and indoctrination, that are helpful for dealing with the tension between freedom and control by parents and teachers. Thiessen argues that to be open to the ideas of others is a good thing, and that in fact, “open-mindedness is closely related to critical thinking.”

In drawing from the work of Socrates’s famous statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” Thiessen suggests that “open-mindedness" is helpful and simply means being open to critical reflection concerning our beliefs as parents, teachers and children, and the beliefs of other people.

Thiessen reminds us that simply presenting Christian truth in an authoritative way “will of necessity discourage critical openness.” However, Thiessen suggests that if "critical openness" is promoted in our schools, then claims of indoctrination have no grounds. Conversely, if schools fail to allow open discussion of alternative views off the world, we may well be shuffling towards a stance of indoctrination.

One of the great dangers in Christian schools, is the temptation to wage a war against cultural practices that are seen as inconsistent with the faith. Faith though is not simply a set of practices, a specific set of values, or even a tightly defined worldview. Rather, our faith reflects “an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior.” How the life of the school mirrors this is of critical importance.

Kevin Vanhoozer in 'Everyday Theology?', suggests that “every part of life signifies something about the values and beliefs that shape culture. Therefore, every part of culture communicates something about the meaning of the whole.” As teachers, we need to 'read' culture, because as well as offering explicit messages, culture communicates basic orientations to life.

How the school manages and constructs the life of the school community and its interaction with and relationship to other diverse communities and sub-communities, as well as their culture and practices, is critical to student formation. As I have written elsewhere in 'Portraits of Literacy Across Families, Communities & Schools', “to be a teacher or a pupil in any school demands specific ways of using language, behaving, interacting, and adherence to sets of values, attitudes” and beliefs. Linguist James Gee argued in 'Social Linguistics and Literacies', schools engage in “particular” discourses. This concept of course has resonance with Etienne Wenger’s concept of “communities of practice.” Gee describes discourses as “ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing that are accepted as instantiations of particular roles (or “types” of people) by specific groups or people.”

The original foundational aim of Christian education, was always the quest to introduce children to the Christian faith. But the greatest challenge for Christian schools is how they present the message of Christianity. For the teacher, the even greater challenge is how do they penetrate the numerous communities of practice where the views and prejudices of every teenager grows. I will have more to say about this in my next post.