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New look 30/05/2011
 
Vacation's over. It's back to school for me. Duty calls for this week's registration period. So what else is new?

This is what's new here at UP Mindanao, paved road from the National Highway up to the Oblation Park fronting the Administration Building.
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Run of the mill 22/04/2011
 
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So we've graduated another batch of students who are ready to take on the world. And we wish them good luck. Meanwhile, it's back to the grindstone for us.

Okay, not really the grindstone as we're given about a month on a so-called vacation. Really more like a reprieve from the regular classroom sessions and student consultations, and less like the vacation in a tropical paradise we had in mind, because we're supposed to spend that month preparing for another year of courses to manage. But still, we can turn that month into a busman's holiday. Nobody is stopping us from working on next term's syllabi while lounging on a beach chair and sipping some piña coladas.

Which horizontal position and perhaps slightly inebriated condition might be the best state to ponder Sir Ken Robinson's "Changing Education Paradigms" as illustrated by RSA Animate.
Which RSA Animate video really had me thinking after my former mentor emailed me its link. What bothered me most was how this change in education paradigm can be operationalized when you work in a system that Sir Ken Robinson describes as one modeled on industrialization. Let's be real here, a colleague might remind me, we still have to measure student learning in terms of standardized tests.

So I was stumped. How do I encourage divergent and creative thinking in my classes, what methods and techniques should I adopt, how do I incorporate such an approach in my syllabi, and how do I ensure that students still get the regular "standardized" lessons they expect plus the value-added features I want to put in?

Then I found a possible answer while tweaking this site. I clicked on the Weebly for Education link and realized that this site can be transformed into something more than just a personal website. By migrating to Weebly for Education, I'm no longer limited to just posting my lecture notes for my students to read. They can actually participate in my site by putting up their own sites/blogs in an environment I can manage. And because I have a Pro account, they can share in the multimedia features for free - they can post video and audio files and embed documents in their own sites/blogs.
And how is this an answer to my dilemma, you may ask? Think about it. My site wouldn't just be my lectures posted online. It can also be my students' sites/blogs managed by me (just like how a classroom works), but with students given the space and the tools to be more creative and imaginative in their assignments. 

So this is how I will change my education paradigm next term. Let's see how it will turn out.
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Learning 04/11/2009
 
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Winslow Homer's 'The Country School'
We got to talking about the business of learning that C (now on the student side of the classroom, after getting a study grant) and I are into, our online chat veering into this subject as she recounted an incident when a friend asked her a simple question, "But how do you understand (place your favorite critical theory here)?" And she was tongue-tied for an answer.

And she found herself laughing for this sudden inadequacy to explain in equally simple terms, terms that would indicate how she owned her knowledge of a theory that she has read and written about or used in a scholarly work and perhaps taught in the classroom.

Which led us to a shared observation of how we have been taught ourselves, and how that education -- speaking now about the Philippine education system -- has molded us into "parrots," to some degree or other, of what we study in school.

Because it's true. We have inherited a system from our colonial masters (now I understand why the UP seal has a parrot in it) that drills us in concepts and theories that we have to regurgitate during oral and written examinations. We learn the skill of footnoting our ideas to showcase the scholarly aptitude and bibliographic fortitude we went through in our research.

But we come to a point, when we're asked or we ask ourselves, in simple terms: How do you understand so-and-so?

This is something that John Dewey, in Democracy and Education (1916), himself pointed out:

"There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy."

And we ask ourselves, do we contribute to this kind of communication that has become separate from how we actually constitute our lives? Education for the sake of literacy?

Or do we participate in the dynamic production of new knowledge? This requires us to question what we learn, and to own what we learn in the process of questioning knowledge.

(This entry was posted last 30 August 2009 in my previous blog.)

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