NewStuff

Have you ever sat bolt upright in the middle of the night – struck by some deep insight that has plagued your mind for time immemorial? Me either. But I did get struck by the blindingly obvious the other day. Most of the guff on this blog has been about one idea. Developing a theory of learner agency. That’s it – simple.

Of course, there are many examples of what learner agency is and is not. I have no interest in making exclusive claims. I do want a frame of reference to discriminate between utter rubbish and sheer brilliance. Those two things should not often hang out together. Knowing what company you are keeping is all important for a relationship to flourish. If the current notion of learner agency is going to stick around for a while, and cause learners to flourish, then we need a solid theoretical base to underscore the practices. Well, that’s my theory anyway.

So, where to then.

1. A learning ecology is a thing.
2. Learning ecologies possess artefacts – curated by experts.
3. Learners become attuned to these artefacts in their ecology.
4. They size up the affordances of the artefact.
5. Then action is taken resulting in the production of more artefacts in the learning ecology.

Simple! The goal here is to throw together the theorists behind each of the concepts above. Anyone can then review a program of learning, event, project, school culture and determine if learner agency is a feature or not.

The best part of this is that there is nothing new in it. Yet it provides a lens through which kids and their grownups alike can measure their actions.

So, Cognitive Load Theory – its a thing, right. Problem is, now I’m very mindful of how full my mind is.

Having spent a life time using nautical metaphors, I’m now actually living them as I navigate the treacherous waters of learning to sail. This week, I’ve been learning how to dock. Sailing – it takes five minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master. Docking is neither. It seems like a vengeful game of Russian roulette with every departure and return. Docking a full keeled boat in a tiny mooring is like forcing your pet pooch through the veterinarian’s front door when they know what’s in store.

It is like leading a class of learners, and leading a community of learners. Hard and terrifying. It just goes with the territory. The thrill and exhilaration of merely surviving intact (self, boat and others) seems to be a pretty low benchmark for success. But by golly gumdrops it feels good.

Right now our tutor program is going full steam ahead.

This is because the Grattan Institute put together a report, largely informed by the British report. Both of these reports used data from a study on literacy learning loss over the summer holidays published in 1996. An earlier much bigger study in 1976 showed no impact on learning growth over the summer holidays.

Even more interesting, studies of schools using online learning were rejected.

The Grattan caveat reads (in part) as follows:

Our estimates are a rough indication of likely learning losses, and there are a number of limitations of our modelling. One limitation is that our estimates are based on the literature about learning losses during summer holidays, and do not completely take into account the impact of remote learning programs, including the efforts by schools and teachers to make remote learning work well.22 (The studies on summer holidays were mostly of students in the first two years of school.)

So now this is very complex! In getting a cheap old full keel boat to pirouette delicately around multimillion dollar trophies without an insurance claim is tough. A lot is going on. You have to get the motor full pelt in order to get enough movement over the control surfaces so that the captain can effect some influence of the direction of the vessel. The momentum must then be reversed or redirected in order to avoid hitting the thing that required such moving in the first place. What seems like an imminent and unavoidable disaster can instantly vaporise as everything comes together in the last possible moment. At other times, what seems like an imminent and unavoidable disaster can instantly materialise, because ‘if you don’t change direction, you’ll hit where you are headed.’ The effects of wind and currents and transmission lag and boat shape and keel design and communication and skill and confidence and local knowledge all come together to inform the size and shape of the disaster – or stories of a near miss, or a cocky unjustified display of mastery. Either way it is terrifying.

So is teaching. It is complex. There actually are no ‘silver bullets’. There may well be a consistent, cumulative effect from marginal gains though. Each student is unique and worthy of having their learning story treated with respect and dignity. This includes their learning as it is, and as it unfolds. My hope is that we can embrace the complexity of the impact of COVID on our kids learning and learn our learners well enough to cause flourishing, no matter what their sea-state.

At last! Caught up in a heap of bills and a refurbished Chromebook won at auction – my fresh new book has arrived. Cognitive Load Theory in Action.

I’m a really big fan of Ollie Lovell. He asks tough, authentic questions to folks in their ivory towers. His curation of education research material has informed the culture of my school.

So to Cognitive Load Theory. I’ve only read chapter one thus far and I have a few wonderings.

1. The notion of Biologically Primary Knowledge as a way of dismissing the need for explaining the preconditions upon which other knowledge can come to exist seems a lot like the ‘Homunculus in the room’.
2. Is learning to read merely an iterative process of memorising complex patterns of letter- sound correspondences? Is it possible that students can learn the word ‘House’ as a sign (ie: the shape of the word representing their concept of ‘house’) If semiotics is a biologically primary function, what role does it play in learning?
3. How does CS Peirce’s notions of induction, deduction and abduction fit into cognitive load theory?

Here on the east coast of Australia, we’ve sighed a deep breath of relief. We’ve only got floods, COVID and lockdowns to deal with this summer. So why worry about bushfire education?

In one stroke of the pen, or a malicious smack by the hand of fate, the purpose of education, and the practice of education comes into sharp relief.  Global western education lives in a peculiar space. Back in the day, schools produced workers. Not hard to work that one out. Schools still produce workers.

Now-a-days, we are more sophisticated, and schools produce data and schools perform accountability. That data is the raw product for many other industries and narratives. The peculiar thing is none of this has anything directly to do with learning, or teaching or flourishing.

A stroke of the pen demanding the production of accountability artefacts, and the blind hand of terror that ravages lives and communities through the impact of bushfire are both masters of what happens in our classrooms. And it is that moment of decision about what happens in the classroom around bushfire education that we see the broader education maelstrom manifest itself.

The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration declares that:

So whilst we can’t measure if students are being the very best they can be, schools can be forced to compete with each other both here and abroad so we can;

‘analyse how well schools are performing against each other and internationally’

This national document sets the frame for the practice of education through policy development. There is an obvious line of ink that positions schools a producers of data and accountability artefacts. This document reflects the current culture in education policy and design.

So what has this to do with bushfire education?

The horrific Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 in Victoria Australia led to a Royal Commission. Recommendation 6 called for Victoria to ‘lead an initiative to ensure that the national curriculum incorporated the history of bushfire in Australia, and that existing curriculum areas include elements of bushfire education.’

So, 12 years on, have we discharged our obligation to teach kids about bushfires or have we caused kids to learn the ‘how-to’s’ of disaster risk reduction for bushfires?

We could produce accountability artefacts telling kids and teachers if they have passed or failed bushfire education by including relevant items on national high stakes testing regimes. We could produce worksheets and work programs referring to safety plans and McArthur meters. We can easily discharge our responsibility to be accountable.

But would our kids actually know how to be safe during bushfires?

The beaches of last resort in Mallacoota, and the charred remains of the Marysville footy oval don’t care how much data we produce, they don’t recognise the nod of approval from some faceless accountability evaluation consultant. They quietly embrace the small footprints of kids who know what to do, and have the power to do it.

So the purpose of Progressive Bushfire Education, is to let kids live with that knowledge and use power to grow it.

In this world where we measure only what we value, the urgency in schools is to discharge curriculum content, track kids progression and rush on to the next bit.

Progressive Bushfire Education is grounded in the process of learning, not the programme of teaching. This means that students acquire basic knowledge on bushfire behaviour, develop and theorise understandings and then take action with their learning.

It is social, formative, agile, often project based but above all it is meaningful to the student who is doing the learning.

Child Centred Disaster Risk Reduction is the idea behind Progressive Bushfire Education.

Teaching bushfire education does not cause risk reduction from bushfire disasters.

Learning bushfire education however, may be that causal link to students being the very best that they can be in a bushfire prone, climate changing environment.

Originally Posted September 30, 2020

Yep – that heading kind of sums it all up. I’m just not certain as to what ‘it’ is getting summed up! None the less, this will be my attempt to summarise the article from a learner agency perspective.

You may know what this sign is for:

The meaning can be abducted by virtue of the context of this post. Yes, it is Chinese for toilet.

The point is that students need to be inducted into the skilful use of artefacts in their learning ecology. A sign is always something that it is not! It points to the thing being signified – without actually being the thing being signified.

If we expect our learners to have the power to shape their world – then they had better become experts on using signs. Being skilful at pointing to stuff and tuning into the stuff that is being pointed to is central to understanding the process by which meaning is made and communicated.

Like Orthography in the previous post, semiosis is all about the action of meaning making / meaning made. It takes from the past and points to future and/or present action. Semiotic Consciousness is the term used for paying attention to what is being signed. A bit like a movie critic picking up on the subtle cues to previous movies or directors styles.

From a learner agency perspective – we are talking about attunement and perception. Now we could start a lengthy conversation about direct perception or a subject / object dichotomy and end up down some rabbit hole. The fact is that kids pick up on stuff – they see an opportunity to use what is in their environment to get what they want. They are attuned to the affordances of a particular object in their ecology.

This is what makes Orthography such a crucial means by which the English writing system is learned. It treats learners with the dignity that is worthy of their agency. Orthography does not see children as blank slates that need computing algorithms embedded into neural pathways to decode decontextualised (and therefore meaningless) signs such as digraphs and trigraphs in order to make meaning (note the irony). It starts with dignity – seeing children as people who use signs to extract and layer meaning.

From this perspective, affordances are the product of the space connecting the teacher to the learner – the relationship. This mutually co-constructed social artefact is a real thing in a learning ecology. It is the locus of semiosis.

The learner is nested in a community of relationships affording epistemological, ontological and ethical phenomena.

‘Logic is the ethics of thinking   –   ethics is the logic of action’

Right thinking, leads to the right actions. It sounds a little Aristotelian but it is better than viewing learners as units for potential economic activity. The dominant philosophy of education – that ‘schools produce data’ would fit this model – ‘data’ being a value laden input unit for economic systems.

As the author summarised:

it is … ‘semiotic consciousness that constructs an expanding field of meanings informed by lived experiences.’

In other words – it takes a village to raise a child. Ways of being, ways of knowing

So much to learn, so few days! I’ve spent the last ten years collecting bits of learning after reflecting on this or that. The repository for all that (http://newstuff.global2.vic.edu.au) is being retired. So this is my new home for all that new stuff I’ve been learning about.

Over the next while, I’ll pop in my old posts. Enjoy!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Yep – that heading kind of sums it all up. I’m just not certain as to what ‘it’ is getting summed up! None the less, this will be my attempt to summarise the article from a learner agency perspective.

You may know what this sign is for:

Do you know what this is for?

The meaning can be abducted by virtue of the context of this post. Yes, it is Chinese for toilet.

The point is that students need to be inducted into the skilful use of artefacts in their learning ecology. A sign is always something that it is not! It points to the thing being signified – without actually being the thing being signified.

If we expect our learners to have the power to shape their world – then they had better become experts on using signs. Being skilful at pointing to stuff and tuning into the stuff that is being pointed to is central to understanding the process by which meaning is made and communicated.

Like Orthography in the previous post, semiosis is all about the action of meaning making / meaning made. It takes from the past and points to future and/or present action. Semiotic Consciousness is the term used for paying attention to what is being signed. A bit like a movie critic picking up on the subtle cues to previous movies or directors styles.

From a learner agency perspective – we are talking about attunement and perception. Now we could start a lengthy conversation about direct perception or a subject / object dichotomy and end up down some rabbit hole. The fact is that kids pick up on stuff – they see an opportunity to use what is in their environment to get what they want. They are attuned to the affordances of a particular object in their ecology.

This is what makes Orthography such a crucial means by which the English writing system is learned. It treats learners with the dignity that is worthy of their agency. Orthography does not see children as blank slates that need computing algorithms embedded into neural pathways to decode decontextualised (and therefore meaningless) signs such as digraphs and trigraphs in order to make meaning (note the irony). It starts with dignity – seeing children as people who use signs to extract and layer meaning.

From this perspective, affordances are the product of the space connecting the teacher to the learner – the relationship. This mutually co-constructed social artefact is a real thing in a learning ecology. It is the locus of semiosis.

The learner is nested in a community of relationships affording epistemological, ontological and ethical phenomena.

‘Logic is the ethics of thinking   –   ethics is the logic of action’

Right thinking, leads to the right actions. It sounds a little Aristotelian but it is better than viewing learners as units for potential economic activity. The dominant philosophy of education – that ‘schools produce data’ would fit this model – ‘data’ being a value laden input unit for economic systems.

As the author summarised:

it is … ‘semiotic consciousness that constructs an expanding field of meanings informed by lived experiences.’

In other words – it takes a village to raise a child. Ways of being, ways of knowing

Orthography – do you have any idea what it means? How would you work it out? In fact, you may already be pulling it apart in your brain to guess at it. I wonder how those meaning making skills formed in your mind?

I’m always looking for those connections, trying to join the dots that lay behind the making of meaning. A ‘Back to Basics’ approach – of actually explicitly teaching pupils the technical language of how words come to represent concepts and meaning is one way of getting our learners to see those dots and develop the skills to join them.

Right now it is becoming more obvious that an orthographic approach to literacy instruction from the early years of education onwards is a useful way to give our children the power to shape their world through their expert use of language.

An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language. In the case of the English language a ‘deep orthography’ is required since there is not an exact match between each unit of sound and the each letter of the alphabet.

When we talk about the sounds letters make we are referring to their phonemes.

When we talk about the symbols that letters take, we are referring to their graphemes.

A ‘letter’ is the smallest functional unit of sound or symbol in a system of language.

The International Phonetic Association chart stands in the gap – symbolising the sounds that can make up a language.

So, in order for students to have the power to shape their world, they need to be experts at using ‘signing’. By signing, I mean, the ability to join the dots between what they see (ie: the sign) and the meaning the sign is pointing to (ie: what is signified). They need to be experts at taking a concept and making it visible. Kind of sounds like the magical stuff that connects the writer to the reader.

I’m talking about semiotics here and a contemporary with American Pragmatist John Dewey. That being Charles Sanders Pierce. More specifically, the role of Edusemiotics is critical to this conversation as it questions

The point is that our kids need be tuned in to the possibilities to shape their world through the use of signs. An Edusemiotics approach to English Orthography specifically apprentices children in to the use of writing from a socio-culturally mediated perspective.

Using an edusemiotic orthological approach – students learn how to see the potential for using written language to take action – and use that potential to take action with their learning, thus, shaping their world.

This moves WAY beyond positioning infant students as only being worthy of learning graphene / phoneme correspondence. Instead, it positions students as being people who are expert meaning makers through the process of mimicry and signification. Much of this expertise was developed pre-linguistically.

So, for a learning community that is genuine about affording learner agency, our youngest students must be inducted into the curious world of an edusemiotic approach to English orthography.

Orthography – is the ‘correct’ (socially mediated) way of writing a language. In English it is constituted by the interrelationship between

Morphology: Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words

Etymology: Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

Phonology:  1: the science of speech sounds including especially the history and theory of sound changes in a language or in two or more related languages

Work on a neurolinguistic approach to language impairments following brain damage indicate that different parts of the brain attend to different functions of language.

Orthography calls into play these different parts of the brain forming meaningful connections between the history, meaning and sound of a word.

Edusemiotics is all about the process of relationship forming and the resultant meaning making. Orthography is all about making meaning through an inquiry into the relationships of a written word through the lens of its etymology, morphology and phonology.

In developing a philosophy of education that accounts for learner agency, an Edusemiotic English Orthography would contain the following elements:

Artifacts: words / signs in the learning ecology

Attunements: Ways of being – behaviours, routines, cultural practices, lexicons, rhythms that model perceiving and signification

Affordances: An inquiry model, structures, resources and a cultural expectation that is primed for action.

Actions / Agency: the making of rules and allocation of resources.

Reducing the teaching of spelling (think – writing) to merely the learning of grapheme / phoneme correspondence is exactly that – a focus on teaching.

Approaching the problem of Spelling from a learner agency informed practice is expediently more complex. It is also the difference between winning approval from an adult by a number from a spelling test score, and causing self efficacy to flourish from giving learners the power to use language to shape their world.

You know there is a problem with Student Agency don’t you? If your school does Student Agency you have a problem. It may sound like  you are at the cutting edge of progressive pedagogy. You may well be up there with Studio Five or High School High or Templestowe College. It sounds like the kind of thing an International Baccalaureate school would do. Student Agency – It looks great on a website, sounds sophisticated to say, it is ‘dope’ and ‘woke’ all at the same time.  And yet, it has a dirty little secret.

Student Agency is not a thing.

Seriously.
Student Agency should be all things to all people, but is nothing to everyone and everything to no one.
Terms like ‘happiness’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘work-life balance’ all mean something to someone but are so context specific that you find yourself  nodding politely and smiling with no idea what the person is actually talking about. Yet it feels like you should.

It’s the same with Student Agency. It is not a thing. We can’t pick the rules of the language game it fits into. And that’s why after 20 years of trying map out its shape, I’ve given up on Student Agency.

Well – almost. The actual problem with Student Agency, is that it is not a thing in modern educational philosophy. There is just no place for it. When it comes to Student Agency, the meta narrative around the purpose for schools is at odds with those in the practice of schooling.

Over the last few decades, discourse around the purpose of schooling has changed. We’ve transmogrified from ‘schools produce workers’ to ‘schools produce data’. By ‘data’ I mean economic activity. It is hardly satisfying , but in this age of praxis – theory in action, some theories eat culture for breakfast.

_____

Currently, I serve in a very small, very old (by Australian standards) school community. We’ve been around since 1875. Back then, there was no mains water, no gas to heat the rooms and horses were banned from the oval. The rough draughty bluestone building afforded hope and certainty. We still have no mains water or gas. Horses are still banned from the oval and the same little old building is at the heart of our learning community.

We talk about giving children the power to shape their world. I’m not sure, but it ought to be really different to Student Agency. We call it learner agency. Have you heard of the saying ‘the proof is in the pudding?’ I’ve got no idea how the proof got in there – or if it is an ingredient? What I do know – is that a ‘pudding’ is the product of a process. That process is the interaction of ingredients and skillful action over time with specific tools in a specialised place.

It is the same with leaner agency. When we see kids tuned into the possibilities in their environment and they take action – then we are seeing learner agency.

Case in point- Our water tanks were running low. Fast forward a few months and the they are on stage at a national student led conference sharing an invented toilet that could be used in Nepal after a landslide.

When asked what they didn’t want to go back to after returning to school after COVID-19 lock down, they said ‘too much time sitting on the floor’. So it was changed!

They tuned into two key structures of school life that they had done quite well without – timetables and grade levels. So on Fridays when they came back – we ditched timetables and grade levels for our senior students.

So how does this relate to Firestarters? Well, you shall have to wait till the next installment!