Navcon2k7, fruit bats, Terrigal Beach and love poems

Bruce: "Just because we're travelling, I don't think that Dick should neglect his studies, so we brought along one thousand key works of literature, his biological specimens, and also his own desk."
Dick: "Yes, I expect to study hard."

I brought along “my one thousand key works of literature, my biological specimens, and also my own desk" but the reality of the “connecting through webmail” experience in the lobby of the Terrigal Sails Apartments meant that I sought other adventures (like watching the bushfires across the water whilst eating fish and chips on the beach at night) during Navcon2k7.

Each night, the Magnet, the “Not a Normal Principal” and I made our way from the diverse Terrigal beachside eateries to stand underneath a large tree below our apartment complex.  Listening carefully to the learning community of large fruit bats hanging in the foliage, saw our Megachiropteran  expertise grow each night – until by the last night our “performance for understanding” meant  we were able to pretend to sounds that precipitated bat flight – claiming title as The Terrigal Fruit Bat Whispering Trio  –   

Listening carefully to what is said is valuable behaviour for educators – it helps you avoid falling in with those futuristic edu_forecasters, crystal gazers, visionaries and 21st Century Learner astrologers who frequent edu_conferences talking about the needs of “generation.com” (if we allow that generation.com exist as a discreet group)

“generation.com:- Critical thinkers or non critical consumers?  the title of Dr Yoram Harpaz’s opening keynote at Navcon2k7 was different from the usual "we are living in an uncertain age" and "we must beware the populations in countries that outsource our jobs" keynotes I have listened to at other educational conferences this year.   

And yet the title made me wonder.  I started by thinking about what happens to our thinking when we frame generation.com as future “consumers”.  Would our thinking be different if we instead dichotomised generation.com as “Critical thinkers or non critical producers?” 

Next I wondered if in creating a dichotomy between non critical consumers and critical thinkers, Harpaz had been too simplistic in his analysis? Perhaps generation.com would be better described in terms of predator and prey, than producer consumer,  perhaps generation.com cannot be faithfully dichotomised.

But it was when Harpaz's Navcon2k7 opening keynote asked delegates to focus on “What are we educating for?” that I was startled into other thoughts.

Yoram challenged educators to identify the choices behind what we do to make things happen in school .... and  to isolate, clarify and understand how these choices are extracted from/ derived from our goals, our ideologies

He proffered three meta ideologies that teachers commonly adopt that make things happen  - socialisation, acculturation and individuation

• Socialisation – the challenge of adapting the child to society – that Chomskyian “taming the young of the bewildered herd” stuff – imparting useful behaviours and qualifications –that will prepare students for the careers favoured by the middleclasses - where you get to wear a suit, and sit behind a desk in a high rise building.
• Acculturation – the challenge of conveying  the essence of a culture – that moulding the child’s character in the light of the values and truths of the preferred culture, was well exemplified by the Navcon2k7 stage display of candle and crucifix, the frequent reference to the splash of one time excommunicated for inciting  the sisters to disobedience and defiance but later blessed Mary Mackillop’s oars   and the alarming student art work on the classroom walls of the conference venue classrooms.
• Individuation – that educational fostering of autonomy and authenticity in each child – the developing of each child’s unique personality is harder to find within our existing educational institutions. We pretend to individuation, we claim to find value in personalisation, we valorise the “autonomous learner” in our rhetoric whilst favouring  group work, and collective experience in our classroom practice.  

Harpaz argued that we have a contradiction within schools because we have fused these three ideologies and because these ideologies helplessly contradict each other  - we never progress.  Alienation and anarchy await education that does not resolve its ideological focus.

In asking “What should we choose for generation.com?” Yoram expressed a personal preference for individuation suggesting in the question time that the choice may not be ours (teachers) to make for much longer with students increasingly choosing their own educational outcomes.

It was interesting analysis, well argued and entertainingly elaborated - and yet the question “What should we choose for generation.com?” is revealing –

I suspect that who is doing the choosing is key here as it is in other arguments about personalisation – and individuation - I will argue that in choosing "What should we choose" Harpaz reinforces assumptions of institutional hierachies, power and control -

The fertile question for generation.com is more likely to be “What will generation.com choose for themselves?”

And as an aside in my thinking here - no one unpacks personalisation and individuation better than Josie Fraser

Harpaz claimed that we should not trust the diagnosis based on ideologies – “diagnosis is biased by utopia – strategy turns to dogma – utopia has no rational and empirical basis – ideology is irrational” , in doing this he seemed to undermine his own argument – for when you think about it the “What should we choose?” question  is in itself an ideology - an ideology bounded by institutional thinking -

The essential contradiction in Harpaz’s keynote comes from an assumption that when we educate we make something happen.   Causal thinking aligned to institutional practice.  In this way his “What should we choose for generation.com?” reminded me of Miller Williams’ “Love Poem With Toast”.

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

Both think in terms of our ability to cause “expected outcomes” rather than acknowledging our inability to influence or even predict probable outcomes (in education). Both "pretend" to causal thinking rather than face the possibility that what we do (in education and over breakfast)  is best exemplified by the tyranny of the accidental.

In this way Leigh Blackall’s deliciously scrambled stream of consciousness keynote – framed as “Is it fascism yet?” and claiming he learned nothing from school created a useful counterpoint.

In this way Navcon2k7's choice of keynoters guaranteed its place as an educators conference that provoked thinking in 2007.     And I haven't even got to the ideas in Adam Lefsteins keynote presentation on dialogue and participatory technologies.

Love Poem With Toast
Miller Williams
Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, 1999
University of Illinois Press