My Most Cherished Teaching Award

Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to have been the recipient of a number of awards for my teaching and educational leadership.

Not one of them, not even my coveted 3M Teaching Fellowship, measures up to what I got on the last day of class this year.

A young man who had been in my 2P90, 2P91 courses, and who had already taken 3P90 last year showed up at the last 3P90 class this year and asked if he could sit in.  It was the very last class of his university career, he explained, and he wanted his last class to be my class.  In fact, he was skipping a class in which he was registered to do this.  My insides just collapsed into an emotional mess.  What a tribute this was, and how honoured I felt.

And as I went around the room asking for comments on what each had learned, I invited our guest student to speak.

Speak he did. 

He began by talking about all he had learned in his 3P90 about  games and about himself, and ended with a heartfelt thanks that soon turned emotional.  Needless to say, I was myself on the verge of a meltdown as this poignant, deeply personal testimony came tumbling out.  I had been offered the Gift of Tears, a gift of which I feel singularly unworthy.

Isn't it amazing?  Our teaching touches students on an emotional level, even as hard-nosed and thick-skinned as they must be to get through the maze of today's university power structures.

This act, performed ingenuously in front of a group of strangers, was humbling and so very, very moving.

This was a teaching award unlike any other.

Finding their own voices ...

Our first-year learning circle has explored all manner of things digital during our discussions and presentations this term, including interactive media, censorship and the Net, being a digital citizen, community and identity in a digital world, and video games and narrative.

I think each of us has a better sense of who we all are, certainly my colleagues in this learning community have more insight into who I am as a teacher, as a learner, as a thinker, as a digital immigrant in the midst of digital natives, and as a human being.

But the greatest accomplishment of this course, in my view, will not be found as a targeted learning outcome on the course outline. Rather, this achievement comes from within every member of our learning circle.

Each student has found his or her own unique voice in the Academy and has begun to exercise that voice.

For some, this has been a relatively easy step. They have made themselves heard since the first class. For others, it has been a more complex process, taking weeks of quiet observation and interior reflection before summoning the nerve to speak. But each and every member of our circle (or rectangle, as we were corrected recently) has found a piece of his or her unique voice that has contributed at least once to our discussions.

In our last meeting, I told them that I spar with them verbally before each class as a way of telling them, "I see you, as an individual and as a person. You and your ideas are important to me. I hear and welcome your voice."

I am very proud of this little community.

Facing the last class is going to be tough.

Digital Salon

Last summer, I would meet informally each Wednesday evening with interested students and their friends and acquaintances to chat about issues in digital culture that were of interest to us. We met at a local coffee house with free wi-fi, sometimes competing for space with D&D tables.

People felt free to come out when they wanted to, or to give it a miss when they had other things to do. The relaxed atmosphere was wonderful, but the people were the best part. It was such a pleasure to get to know these young men and women simply as people, people with wonderful, crazy, provocative ideas. There were no constructed roles, no professor and student. And when they brought friends along, or family members, our conversations were that much enriched. Social constructivism in action popped into my mind.

Robbie, Christie, Andrew, Dan ...

Recently, on at least 5 occasions, I have been asked whether the Digital Salon will be meeting again this summer. Two of the inquiries have come from people who were not part of the core group last year, so I don't know how word of this spread.

The answer, of course, is of course, "Yes!"

It is both a pleasant surprise and an encouraging sign for unhurried evenings of renewed conversations.

Joy

Look at my face. That is joy. That is delight. That is affirmation.

It is March 17, St. Patrick's Day. The sun is finally shining, crocuses and hyacinthes are pushing up through the thawing earth, and once again today, I have been reminded of the reason I draw my nourishment from teaching.

I have just read an assignment submitted by a first-year student. The student is in the course that was not particularly responsive to inquiry learning, not particularly responsive to transformative learning or social constructivist learning. Many in the class seemed to be not particularly responsive to university at all.

I had begun to wonder whether my beliefs in student-centred learning had been misplaced. After all, students have in the past reacted well to the kind of creative freedom and acknowledgment of their views that my pedagogy reinforces. Yet this group seemed to be entrenched in cynicism. No matter what I proposed in the way of learning avenues, many of the class seemed to find reasons to dismiss the ideas or to discredit their intellectual value as mere necessary evils that one had to endure in order to get the credentials they wanted for life after uni.

In a semester-long Gethsemane of soul searching, I had been questioning my value to these students as a guide to their intellectual maturity since Christmas break.

And then I read the assignment of the student to whom I have referred.

There it was, a well-written, thoroughly researched response that sank a spade firmly into the superficial observations, dug back the obvious top layers and exposed the rich and subtle substrata of meaning and interconnection. The tone was mature and confident, the vocabulary admirable. The argument was introduced, examined and triangulated, and a reflective conclusion bound it all together.

A young scholar had emerged into the brilliant sunlight of his intellectual Spring.

There are more like this in that pile of papers that now beckons to me. I will bet my life on it.

With portents of Spring like this, I am now content to settle into my own inevitable Winter and let new growth blossom.

[Post-script:  A student responded to my despair in her own blog post that she revealed to me later:  read that response here in "An Open Letter to Barry Joe"]

My Father

Chou Man Look

My father taught me lessons I never knew would find resonance in so many corners of my life, and all without saying a word.

He was the product of a brutal "school of hard knocks" childhood and youth that would have crushed lesser men.

At 12, he was sent from his tiny farming village in Guangdong province in China into indenture to his uncle in Montréal so that he could send money home to his impoverished parents. The promise of Gim San, "Gold Mountain," stole his childhood.

He landed in Vancouver in 1922, a child lost in a crowd of lost children streaming off the Empress of Canada steamship. He stepped into a foreign land whose language he did not speak, whose food he had never tasted.


Official government documents describe him like a steer at auction, as mere Oriental inventory. My sister and I both sat in stunned silence in the Vancouver public library a few years ago as we peered at the microfiche capsule of a human life:

Jew Mun Look

Male, 12 Bor Law Schoolboy

Empress of Canada 1922 December 4

Mole, centre right cheek

4’ 6.5 inches

mole back left neck

small mole above right eyebrow

small pit under left eye

He had a note written in English pinned to his tattered jacket, "Take this boy off the train in Montreal."

  My father was subject to the racist head tax imposed only on Chinese by the Canadian government (my sister has the certificate framed in her home to remind her, to remind us, to remind them ...).

 He worked in essential slavery for that uncle as a child, paying off first the costs of his passage to Gold Mountain, then his exhorbitant head tax of $500.

He endured the pervasive, systemic discrimination of a Canada that enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923-1947), a Canada that extended to Chinese Canadians the right to vote in federal elections only in 1947.

But he survived. In a time and place where it was mandated by law that Chinese could not become doctors, lawyers, or accountants, he survived. In a country where a poor Chinese child with no nuclear familial support could not expect even a rudimentary education, he survived.

He learned how to cook Western food, because cook was one of the few jobs Chinese could hold. His greatest memory that became his signature story was of the time he worked in the Prince of Wales Club, long since defunct, in Niagara Falls. He had prepared a batch of cream of celery soup when the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII was visiting. According to my father's account, the Prince walked into the kitchen and began sampling food, among the dishes was my father's potage à l'impérial.

 

Dad became a salesman for Chinese import/export firms specializing in bolts of silk, he opened his own fish and chip restaurant on Pape Avenue in Toronto, he owned a hand laundry on Vaughan Road where I was born.

 He married outside his race, a dangerous act in those times, for both my father and my mother. He raised a family of four children, all of whom attended university.
He lived a hard, difficult life and endured. When, as a farmer, his produce rotted and was dumped at the consignment wholesaler's, he gritted his teeth and went back into the fields. When, one winter as we especially felt our poverty and he had to accept the Christmas charity basket sent by the local church for us, he swallowed his pride and said thank you. When, as a lawn maintenance man, he was repeatedly humiliated and ridiculed by his rich clients and their demands that he perform the tasks they would not ("My dog died -- you're the gardener --bury it!"), he ate the bitterness and came back the next week.
He told us tales of the blatant discrimination he had endured and warned us to be prepared, for our slightly almond eyes would betray us in this society.

And they did.

He hoped his stories would toughen our skins, harden our psyches so that razor-sharp prejudice would not pierce our souls as it had his.
Education was our passport, he told us repeatedly. No one can take it away from you. And he made sure we attended to our education, insisting, cajoling, demanding until we understood our own responsibility in the undertaking and began to drive ourselves.
My father was right.
Perhaps this is the reason that indifference to education, feigned or real, on the part of my students is like a red flag to me. I fought so hard, with so few resources, so that I could attend university (OSAP was finally established just as I was entering first year at Victoria College, University of Toronto).

When I hear my students tell me they don't care, or when they say that they don't put much effort into a project "because it's only first year, dude!" I feel the affront deeply.

I feel it as an affront to me, as an affront to my father who understood the value of an education he would never have, and as an affront to those potential students who cannot be in that seat because they cannot afford tuition.
I cannot help but feel the responsibility to teach my students the most important lesson my father taught me without his ever saying a word.

Let me be as good a teacher as he was. Thanks, Dad.

Das Werdende - The Becoming

It is beginning to happen. I am noticing a slow shift away from the silly and pointless high school avowals that:

• studying is for nerds
  
• we are here just to get the degree and get out
• we don't care
• we do not think about who and what we are

I am starting to notice an interest, a tentative probing by my first-year students at the world around them, and some very positive acts that may corroborate my observation.

This is incipient reflection, a discovery that "what I think may actually have value or consequence."

I think of the process as digital constructivism, a nascent inquiry into self that opens the first of so many other doors to so many other questions.

I hope I am right.

If Today Were The Day You Had To Stop Teaching...

Too painful a thought.

I can't write this.

Return

Term has started and I rise each day with the excitement and expectation that teaching brings to my life. Students have returned to campus and it is once again alive, revived from its summer emptiness.

I am already in love with my classes, barely a week into the term. To my great delight, I have in each of them bright, engaged, committed minds who seek to challenge me and each other in the intellectual fencing match that can have no loser.

It is exhilarating to be in the same room with these students, caught up in the vibrant energy stream of their youthful exhuberance, of their existential certainty.

I know I will learn a lot from them and that makes me smile. I can't wait for the little pearls of wisdom my students always leave with me!

Treasures

"Ludus is the politicization of Paidea."

"Narrative is the application of the time dimension to our memories."

These little treasures make me happy.

It's Over

It was a day full of emotion for me, this April 3rd.

Last day of term - shouldn't there be at least a momentary gasp of relief? It was a very long winter, so should I not be feeling a weight lifting from my shoulders?

No feelings of relief, but rather a sweet melancholy that nuzzles my heart, a joyful narrative of triumphs ... in the past tense.

And there is also chest-swelling pride that peeks through at every opportunity. The growth, not only intellectual but also personal, that I was invited to witness in my students was unique, a process that can be seen only from the special vantage point of the classroom.

This is a year that I shall remember long after I have taken my leave of the university.

This was food for the soul.

Illuminating imaginations

"There are two ways of spreading light;
be the candle or the mirror that reflects it"
- Edith Wharton

Being a teacher is the centre of my professional life.

I have adapted theories of learning to my practice, specifically transformative learning and social constructivism, because I believe these processes empower my students.

I have developed courses around theories of learning, specifically inquiry-based learning, because I trust that, given the appropriate environment and encouragement, my students will take control of their own learning.

But above all, I have tried in my practice to be a model for my students, a model of the academic ideals I endeavour to convey to them, because I will not ask of my students anything that I would not demand of myself.

Do not perform as a teacher.

Be a teacher.

If, indeed, I as teacher have been a mirror in the classroom, the light from the imaginations of my students will illuminate the world.

End is in Sight

My students are running on fumes right now. I can see it in their body language and in their loss of responsiveness in class. And who can blame them?

They are being crushed under the weight of final essays, projects, seminars, assignments. Yes, many of them have procrastinated and time is now catching up to them. But many more are managing two or more jobs while still in school.

University is no longer the primary occupation of post-secondary students, as it was in my undergraduate career. University is now one more timed event that one must fit into a very busy life that is often governed by several part-time jobs.

Courage to share

I recently had the pleasure of witnessing a transformation in one of my classes. Before my very eyes, the students had morphed into a community of scholars, argumentative yet respectful of each other's ideas, engaged with the material yet still open to being persuaded to re-think their own views. They shared arguments they had made in a recent assignment, they referenced readings from a class given last semester, they called on knowledge acquired in related courses.

It was magic. What transformed this group, I believe, was trust -- trust in each other and in the learning space they had created for themselves, trust in the process of a truly student-centered education. Most importantly, I saw students trust themselves enough to take intellectual risks. It is a remarkable little community of scholars that has coalesced out of 24 random enrolments.

I cannot imagine a better way to spend my life than sharing ideas and debating with my students.

I cannot imagine a more powerful moment than when I slip so easily out of the role of teacher into the role of learner as my students share their lives, thoughts and passions with me, and graciously allow me to share mine with them.

Retirement beckons a short five years hence.

And I cannot imagine that first day of retirement ... without my students.

Transformed

It has happened.

Sometime during the weekend, the change crept over me, like dusk sidling up to day. It was never supposed to be like this.

Students often produce their creative projects for me in Mac format, so after at least 25 years of resisting it, I purchased a Macbook on Friday. It was for convenience, so I could read their work, and I could also dabble in the kind of creative process they were using and thus better understand their journey.

It was cute; a little white block and I must admit, I was impressed -- take it out of the box and thwwwzzziipppppppp! it worked. Found the wireless network, was fully charged, needed no multi-disk setup. It worked. And the aesthetics of its design were rather pleasing, from the charger plug with its fold-out cable coiler to the clever little battery button on the bottom. Hmmm, I allowed, well-designed, well thought-out.

Saturday night, I found myself cradling that little Macbook as I fell asleep.

It has happened.

I love my Mac.

Who am I NOW???

A "New" St. Thomas University

The faculty at St. Thomas fight on in their battle with their employer, for a battle it has been declared.

It demands solidarity and determination to walk picket lines in freezing rain and at times, in -18 C. weather.

The faculty are still locked out by the employer. Even if they abandoned the strike that was initiated a week after the lockout, they still could not return to their classrooms, and students would still be unable to resume their second term.

The St. Thomas administration has locked them out.

This is the communication each faculty member received at 4:30 on December 26:

Effective 6:00 p.m. on December 27, 2007, all Full- and Part-time members of FAUST employed by St. Thomas University will be locked-out from employment. No such employees will be permitted on the premises of St. Thomas University without the express written authorization of the University.

Locks were changed on all doors of the university. Faculty are prohibited by law from entering the university.

If I were a St. Thomas student, I would be demanding a tuition refund from the administration that is withholding access to my greatest resource, the professoriate.

A New Year - 2008 -- and We're Back!

So was hätt einmal fast die Welt regiert!
Die Völker wurden seiner Herr, jedoch
Daß keiner uns zu früh da triumphiert --
Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch, aus dem das kroch!

Bert Brecht, Arturo Ui

"Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again ..."


A new year was ushered in last night, an event which gives us pause to reflect on the year past and to look ahead with optimism and hope into the promise of 2008.

Not so in Fredericton, where our colleagues of St. Thomas University have been locked out since December 27! On this New Year's Day, when the rest of the country celebrates with municipal levées or merely nurses a slightly throbbing head, St. Thomas colleagues are opening their LOCK OUT HEADQUARTERS.

Make no mistake -- the Faculty Association of St. Thomas (FAUST) has not yet even called for a strike vote from its membership! They were bargaining in good faith against this administration when they were served with a notice of lockout on Boxing Day!

This is a first in Canadian university history, faculty locked out before they have even considered a strike. It is a sad and sorry precedent set by STU's President and Board of Governors. Imagine the message it is sending to its students -- "We have no interest in your term nor in your educational welfare. We intend to crush this union and train this faculty once and for all to obey their administration, and unfortunately you students merely got in the way."

A New Year ... and a new bully on the block.

St. Thomas students return to campus on January 9, but they return to classrooms that are empty because the President of St. Thomas and its Board of Governors have taken the utterly irresponsible action of locking out its professors. Make no mistake -- the Board of Governors has taken the tuition of these students and is now denying them what they have paid for in good faith.

Shame, President Higgins!
Shame, Governors!

The Final Post

 

 

Well, it has been one hell of a roller coaster ride, hasn't it? From October 18 until today, December 7, we have shared this space emotionally, viscerally: 7 weeks, 35 posts. Today it ends. I am going to pick up the unraveled threads of my work and finish my marking before grades are due. I can now turn my thoughts to a more deliberate celebration of the Christmas Feast than I had thought would be possible. And I will spend many, many moments over the holidays, lost in my thoughts over a mug of coffee or a pot of tea, trying to ascertain what I take with me from this experience. Some things are already clear to me:

• I have learned that I am first and foremost a teacher, for whom the thought of leaving my students for the picket line is the source of tremendous emotional distress.

• I have learned that open and honest communication with my students, with all students is vital for my university.

• I have learned how to better interpret the lexicon of negotiating. It is a language hitherto outlandish to most of us at Brock, but we are now ruefully more fluent in its Byzantine twists.

• I have watched my Faculty Association come of age. BUFA has been tempered in the crucible of robust challenge and has emerged the stronger for the tempering.

To the students who left comments, both laudatory and critical, I congratulate you on taking the time to express your views and to make a difference. To all those students who participated by sitting in, by writing letters and e-mails, by stopping to discuss the issues at the information pickets, by asking tough questions at the BUFA Info Session, by drawing editorial cartoons, by wearing a BUFA button (or a BUFA button that had been crossed out!) and also by discussing the strike issues with your friends and professors, I applaud your engagement. Time for me to take my dog for a walk. Good night and good bye.

Entspannen = literally "de-tense" or "de-tighten"

 

I have been home for a while now, and the news of no strike is just starting to register with me. At last, I may unclench all that I have been clenching! I sit in the recliner with a mug of hot, sweet tea, and as I mentally decompress, my body reacts with surprising swiftness. My biceps ache and when I reach to rub the decrepit muscle, it is alarmingly sore. Didn't realize that I externalized my tension to that degree. Just before I left the office, I took down three volumes from my bookshelf to bring home with me. 

 

The first, by Gerhart Hauptmann, is Die Weber, a social drama of Naturalism that chronicles the Silesian weavers' bitter uprising against exploitative bosses in 1848.

 The second is Germinal, Emile Zola's Naturalist novel of 1885 that is a fictional account of French miners whose need for social justice overcomes their personal fears and leads them to strike against the oppressive capitalist mine owners. 

 The last book is The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life by Parker Palmer, an "educational activist" who captured my heart in his introduction:

"This book is for teachers who have good days and bad—and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts, because they love learners, learning, and the teaching life."

Background reading for the next Collective Agreement in two years ...

Tentative Agreement!!

Yes, I am a bit late with this -- had an e-mail from my friend Roger Moore in New Brunswick telling me that he had already heard a tentative agreement had been reached. And students have been sending comments to report the same .

What a wonderful wonderful piece of news. Students will still find it hard to go back to studying after all the anxiety, but what a relief for all of us in the trenches, students and faculty alike!

Still, there is a dark corner of my mind that keeps nagging at me: "Could we not have settled this two weeks ago without putting the most important stakeholders, our students, through this night of hell?"

Oh, shut up Barry!! Push those dark thoughts aside, it's time to celebrate!

Students

Look at the comments from the Waiting post. I am so sick at heart I could hurl. I am terribly embarrassed that students thank me for maintaining this blog, when I am poised to take a step that will impede thelearning of my students, of every student at Brock. 

 

It is an act that is contrary in every way to my credo as a teacher and learner. It is an act into which I have been forced by an administration that seems to be imposing a corporate, top-down labour matrix on the university. And it is an act that I must (not gladly) see through. Through it all, students -- the ones so deeply affected, yet the least consulted -- are keeping this vigil with me. And I am humbled by their faith and their courage in this ordeal. During this ennervating strike process, I have been encouraged and inspired by students and their reactions.

• I recall the week-long sit in at the Tower elevators, the petition, the declaration of intent to return to bargaining signed by the BUFA negotiating team.
• I think of the letters to the Brock Press that I read. And I think of the many letters to the administration that went unanswered.
• I think of the editorial cartoons in the Press yesterday.
• I remember the e-mails from my current and former students, offering strength and moral reinforcement. And the e-mails from students I have never met have just stunned me!

If I may appropriate Shakespeare for this circumstance:

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee,--and then my state (Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate

Thank you. You deserve so much more than this. But thank you. As this day indeed breaks, and there is still no news, the students of Brock nevertheless raise my spirit.

As always.