Yesterday I (Gisela Wajskop) shared with Monica McGlynn-Stewart an important moment 
in her professional and personal life as well as in the lives of her students at George Brown College (Toronto, Ontario). I attended the Second Annual Bachelor of Early Childhood Leadership Research Symposium organized jointly with Fanshawe College (London, Ontario) and Sheridan College (Oakville, Ontario). The event celebrated the innovative early childhood education (ECE) program. This four-year program prepares students to be educators and to become leaders in curriculum and pedagogy development for Ontario’s early childhood settings. These include: childcare centers, nursery schools, family drop-in programs (including Ontario Early Years Centres, family resource centers and parenting programs), family support programs, and early intervention services.
I was quite excited by the students’ serious and enthusiastic research presentations that were based on their practice/placements in schools and community centres. The program believes the field of ECE requires critical thinkers and practitioners who have vision, a professional demeanour, and in-depth knowledge. The ECE program wants to prepare future leaders and educators; they hope to empower students by using a variety of pedagogical strategies (e.g., research on practice). Overall they aim to raise expectations for their students; the new standards for the profession raise the accountability bar.
Attending the Symposium reminded me of my Brazilian students and the practices we developed together the last 12 years. As a teacher educator I was committed to empowering my students to have a critical voice in the field just as those three Colleges aim to do.
Participating in this very special event reminded me that we are entering Passover: I am grateful to Monica who opened her door to me … and I wish her students all the best. Under her supervision and leadership may they develop and become better people and excellent professionals.
Chag Sameach for all!
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Teacher Educators, Literacy Educators, and Digital Technology Experts Working Together
I (Clare) am pleased to share some good news. We submitted a proposal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to fund the project Rethinking Literacy Teacher Education for the Digital Era: Teacher Educators, Literacy Educators, and Digital Technology Experts Working Together. One of the main activities of the project will be bringing together 16 experts from three fields and 4 countries (Canada, US, UK, and Australia) to address the following questions.
- How is our understanding of literacy evolving in light of the new ways we communicate?
- How can literacy/English teacher educators (LTEs) prepare student teachers to develop and implement literacy programs that capitalize on digital technology (DT)?
- What teacher education curriculum changes are required to better prepare future teachers to integrate technology in their own teaching?
- What professional learning support do LTEs need to develop courses that will integrate and make greater use of DT?
As a team we are going to work together to:
- develop a statement on literacy teacher education that offers direction on how to integrate digital technology into teacher education literacy courses;
- extend our website http://www.literacyteaching.net to include video interviews of all the participants discussing their views and current research and their course outlines and supplementary course materials;
- produce an edited book Crossing Boundaries: Literacy/English Teacher Educators Incorporating Digital Technology in Their Courses
Click here to read the summary of the proposal. Final Summary of Proposal
As academics we tend to work in our “silo” which although allows us to specialize it has 
limitations. The symposium will provide an opportunity to work in an inter-disciplinary manner which may help us move forward the field of literacy teacher education. My co-applicants for the proposal are Lin Goodwin (Teachers College), Simone White (Monash University), Bethan Marshall (King’s College UK), Jean Murray (University of East London), and Clive Beck (University of Toronto). I will continue to provide updates on our work.
21st Century Learning and the Need to Shift Our Thinking
Several of our posts refer to 21st century learning, technology, multi-literacies and thinking about today’s student and world. I (Yiola) found this article from the Huffington post called: The Global Search for Education: Education and Jobs quite interesting. The article talks about the need for drastic changes to our Educational systems in order to meet the growing demands of the market place in the 21st century. Bottom line, technology is taking over many of the jobs people currently do and so we need to reconsider the skills we are providing to students. The article goes on to say that our traditional and current systems continue to develop linear thinkers and producers but what we really need to develop are individuals with:
the ability to initiate, discern, persevere, collaborate, and to solve problems creatively are the qualities most in demand today and will be increasingly important in the future. The problem is that our education system was designed, primarily, to teach the three R’s and to transmit content knowledge. We need to create schools that coach students for skill and will, in addition to teaching content. If we don’t make this transition quickly, a growing number of our youth will be unemployable at the same time that employers complain that they cannot find new hires that have the skills they need.
I tend to agree with the article however I raise two points for discussion:
1) Teacher education programs do teach to the creative, inquiry-based modes of pedagogy. I certainly cannot speak for all programs but I am familiar with several and teacher educators do work hard to teach pedagogies that meet the needs of today’s learners. So, why then are classroom teachers not teaching in these ways? Or, are they?
2) I have seen time and time again policies and actual changes take place at the Government level but once changes happen in schools it is often society at large that is in an uproar. For example, here in Ontario we have implemented Full Day Kindergarten (early years) and the program is designed to develop higher level thinking right from the start. This transition, while happening, has not been without significant reluctance from the general public. What then do we do?
For more considerations here is the full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-m-rubin/the-global-search-for-edu_b_5084761.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share
AERA
To All of Our Blog Followers,
Our team will be at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for the next few days. So we will not be doing daily posts. If you are attending AERA please stop by one of our sessions and say hello. We will be back to our regularly posting next week.
Clare Kosnik, Clive Beck, Pooja Dharamshi, Cathy Miyata, Lydia Menna, and Yiola Cleovoulou
Striving for Equal Digital Opportunity
An article by Kristin Rushowy in the Toronto Star on April 1 reported that almost 60% of Toronto schools allow students to BYOD (bring your own device). http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2014/04/01/byod_bring_your_own_device_now_in_most_ontario_schools_survey_finds.html
This indicates a trend. Not long ago the debate was whether it was “safe” for students to bring their smartphones or tablets: what if they did inappropriate things with them? Also, would students be distracted by their devices? At AERA two years ago I (Clive) attended a roundtable on just these issues.
What teachers have found (and many in our longitudinal study report this) is that, if rules are laid down and habits established, the potential problems can largely be overcome. Moreover, this process provides opportunities to teach students about digital responsibility, etiquette, etc.
The Star article focused rather on the question of equity: does BYOD increase the disparity between rich and poor students, or potentially reduce it? People for Education research director Kelly Gallagher-Mackay argues for the latter position, “as long as (boards) realize it’s not a level playing field, and consciously address that.”
While most school districts can’t afford to buy devices for everyone, they can make up the difference for students who don’t have them; and tech firms are often willing to help out. Rushowy reported: “Last year, the Peel board arranged for $55 tablets for families, and last month began a pilot project giving low-income families discounted refurbished computers.”
There will always be a stigma attached to needing help of this kind. But it seems better to tackle it head-on in the classroom rather than ignoring an inequality everyone knows about anyway. It’s also better to have devices in the classroom, provided we can find ways to make it work. The investigation continues.
The Demise of 21st Century Literacy
We often talk about all the new literacies that the 21st century brings and how we as educators must develop an awareness of the newer modes of communicating… I (Yiola) do agree and yet, we must be recognize there are losses too.
John Harris’s ‘Inside the A* Factory’
A feature in the Guardian on the 15th March, by left-wing journalist John Harris, aroused a good deal of interest among teachers (still going if last Saturday’s letters page is anything to go by). But ‘Inside the A* Factory’ received little coverage elsewhere in the media and the underlying issues (teacher workload, teacher morale and the factory model of schooling) also continue to be ignored by the press and broadcasters. There is a national teacher strike this coming week and a lay reader would be hard-pressed to know it was happening let alone why it was happening.
The article was essentially a collection of stories of different teachers’ experiences of working in schools over the last 20 years or so. The age of the teachers reflected that but the majority of Harris’s sample seemed to be 30 or under and talking about the last five or six years. The picture…
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Strategies for Maintaining Motivation and Satisfaction as a Teacher (and Teacher Educator)
Teaching is challenging. As David Labaree (2004) says:
“[T]eaching is an extraordinarily difficult form of professional practice. It is grounded in the necessity of motivating cognitive, moral, and behavioral change in a group of involuntary and frequently resistant clients.” (pp. 55-56)
In our study of teachers, we (Clive and Clare) have been struck BOTH by the many challenges the teachers face AND how well they maintain their morale despite the challenges. Of the original cohort of 22 who began in 2004, none have quit teaching (though 2 have left the study) and none have experienced a substantial, permanent decline in motivation, though they have their ups and downs. When in 2012 we asked them explicitly about their motivation over the years, their responses were as follows:
Average Motivation of Cohort 1 (18 interviewed) Over Their First Eight Years (Scale 1-5)
| Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5 | Year 6 | Year 7 | Year 8 |
| 4.7 | 4.4 | 4.4 | 4.4 | 4.1 | 3.8 | 3.8 | 4.2 |
Interestingly, their highest motivation was in year 1. Though they were stressed and exhausted, they were excited to be doing what they had dreamed of for so long.
As for the strategies they used to keep up their morale, we noted the following:
- Acknowledging the inherent challenges and limits of teaching – “it’s not just you”
- Taking a broad approach to teaching, so it’s more social, meaningful, enjoyable
- Becoming more skilled and effective as a teacher
- Maintaining a work-life balance: having a life beyond teaching
- Remembering why you became a teacher in the first place (see quotes below)
“Teaching is getting harder, and I’ve changed in that I would no longer recommend it to everyone…. However, I like it because I’m a doer, I enjoy being creative, and I like being challenged.” (Felicity, year 7)
“I’m happy to go to school [because] you just never know what’s going to happen; it’s always a new day.” (Jody, year 8)
“When things were going in a wrong direction [recently] with my school administration and in the school district, it brought me back to why I was there, why I wanted to be a teacher: working with the kids, dealing with their issues, getting down to the fundamentals of teaching them.” (John, year 8)
Great strategies! Good for teachers – and teacher educators too!
The Power of Children’s Literature and its Omissions
While I (Yiola) knew there was a lack of representation of “people of colour” in children’s literature, I was surprised to read the statistics. The chart below shows the number of books published last year and the number written ‘by’ and ‘about’ the different groups defined as ‘people of colour’.
|
Year |
Total Number of Books Published (Est.) |
Number of Books |
African / African Americans |
American Indians |
Asian Pacifics/ Asian Pacific Americans |
Latinos |
||||
|
|
|
|
By |
About |
By |
About |
By |
About |
By |
About |
|
2013 |
5,000 |
3,200 |
67 |
93 |
18 |
34 |
90 |
69 |
48 |
57 |
Two fantastic articles in the New York Times last week prompted me to write this blog:
The articles share the stark realities and implications of the statistics represented above from the experiences of African American men, writers themselves. Reading the articles echo and confirm what I believe to be the realities and consequences of our publishing marketplace. And yet, what to do about it?
The other day I was speaking to a high school educator (a behavior specialist, child and youth worker) who shared stories with me about boys in her school who are misbehaving, who are rude and disrespectful. I shared with her the ideas that their behaviours must stem from something much bigger than an attitude problem… that they may feel oppressed, misrepresented or not represented at all by the school and broader society. I do not think she was buying my argument.
My role as a teacher educator is to inform future teachers of the realities of teaching, learning and schooling. Part of that role includes understanding how systems work for and against particular groups and individual students. One concrete area for exploring such systems is children’s literature.
Christoper Myers, author of “The apartheid of children’s literature”, describes books as maps to identity and ways of being:
[Children] see books less as mirrors and more as maps. They are indeed searching for their place in the world, but they are also deciding where they want to go. They create, through the stories they’re given, an atlas of their world, of their relationships to others, of their possible destinations.
The consequences of excluding certain groups:
what it means is that when kids today face the realities of our world, our global economies, our integrations and overlappings, they all do so without a proper map. They are navigating the streets and avenues of their lives with an inadequate, outdated chart, and we wonder why they feel lost.
Alternatively, Walter Dean Myers, author of the second article, explains what happened to him when he connected to a text:
Then I read a story by James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues.” I didn’t love the story, but I was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem, and it was a story concerned with black people like those I knew. By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map.
And so, how do we as teacher educators empower teachers so they empower students to realize the flawed systems we live in but and to move beyond them to ensure each child can navigate and negotiate their personalized, broad, rich landscape of possibilities? I suggest: we ourselves develop a critical stance and what Noddings calls a culture of care; we are explicit about the realities of the systems we currently work in; and we work hard to search out texts and materials that share rich stories of all of our students and beyond. More so, I suggest we move to change the marketplace by publishing texts that begin to close the gaps in representation in children’s literature.
What Can I Do With a PhD?: Opening Doors to Rewarding Careers
With continued cutbacks at universities, it is becoming more and more difficult for newly graduated students to secure an academic position at a university. Is a career as an academic the only/best choice? A new report suggests a PhD can open many doors and during doctoral studies candidates should be exploring many option and acquiring a range of skills. The League of European Research Universities published an “advice paper” on Good Practice Elements in Doctoral Training. http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014020617152794
Some of the key findings of the report are:
· PhDs are increasingly drivers of their own professional development; and the training model in which the PhD candidate is heavily dependent on one supervisor is no longer robust.
· over and over again it demonstrates that some of the most research-intensive universities in Europe are prioritising transferable skills, which are now being built into training programmes for doctoral candidates and, most frequently it seems, as elective course options and often in collaboration with other organisations.
· the introduction presents 29 such transferable competencies like ‘working in teams’, ‘persisting in achieving long-term goals’ and ‘understanding the working of a specific high-level research-intensive environment’.
As a doctoral supervisor, one of the first things I (Clare) want to know from my students is what do they want to do when they complete their doctorate. I want them to be honest which is often difficult because the prevailing norm in universities is that doctoral candidates should want to be academics. Some of my former doctoral students did not want to be academics but were nervous to reveal their intentions. If I am going to support my students fully I want to know what they hope the doctoral studies will lead to. I can report some of my students who did not want to be academics are happily employed in a range of positions: research officer in a school district, classroom teacher, and psycho-educational consultant. During their doctoral studies I tried ensure they are set-up to get a particular position (e.g., present at specific types of conferences). A PhD in education should open many doors. It is important for us as supervisors to know there are many doors all of which can lead to a fruitful career.
Literacy Teaching and Teacher Education 