I am taking a break from the day job to finalise the revision of the Y9 and Y10 science textbooks. And whilst Bill’s post helps me realise the day job in in teaching, learning and ict relies on my “expertise with air guitar” , revising the two science text books relies upon my ability to frame scientific content.
I am quite enjoying the dislocation required by this shift in thinking.
In New Zealand we are proud of our geological edginess... we like to describe ourselves as living in the “the wobbly isles”.... sitting precariously astride those two plate boundaries - in a landscape overstuffed with volcanoes, earthquakes and geothermal activity. Yet the more I think about our geological history, the more I realise our enduring narrative is less about edginess and more about the advantages of being submerged and forgotten, cast adrift from Gondwana and forging something unique from isolation.
And celebrating what has come from submersion and isolation – come from a failure to connect - seems kind of strange given the assumption inherent in all the Web2.0 participatory media stuff that connecting with others is in some way advantageous and preferable to solitariness for learning.
In truth we are a geologically tentative landmass ... in the time of the 21st Century learner only the long narrow mountainous part of the whole Zelandia landmass can be persuaded to show itself. The huge continental shelves of Zelandia - the Challenger Plateau, Lord Howe Rise, Chatham Rise and Campbell Plateau remain under water, seemingly unaware or uninterested in all the predictions of shifting paradigms above. We may well claim to be riding the “: knowledge wave” in the day job but in a geological sense we are mainly submerged.
Being submerged is not a metaphor that is associated with positive outcomes in education or destination. Lakoff and Johnson would describe it as an orientation metaphor where happy is up; sad is down, conscious is up; unconscious is down, health and life are up; sickness and death are down, having control or force is up; being subject to control or force is down, more is up; less is down, high status is up; low status is down, good is up; bad is down, virtue is up; depravity is down, rational is up; emotional is down.
I once used the orientation metaphor when I described Hamilton as a city built upon dampness and depression – as a place of tectonic depression and serial gravel pits - a post which makes me anxious of discovery and exile every time we drive into the city to work in Hamilton schools. But stepping back from this and looking at the geological history of the whole country reveals that that 330 to 142 million years ago the landmass that was to become New Zealand was in an even greater slough of despond than Hamilton –we were sunk deep under the sea in the Great New Zealand Geosyncline.
The separation of the New Zealand landmass from the supercontinent Gondwana occurred about 85 million years ago, the ocean between New Zealand and Australia goes back about 55 million years. The better known tradition has it that the distance between New Zealand and Australia became a feature when a male demigod Maui hauled the North Island of New Zealand from the ocean depths with a fishing line and a jawbone hook baited with nose bleed. The lesser known tradition is that we came from a floating placenta of the earth mother Papatūānuku.
That a testosterone fuelled tale of the one that didn’t get away is better remembered than an oestrogen based account of a floating placenta should surprise no one who is familiar with the invisibility of women’s lives and the way history is recorded. However, whether we came from the floating womb of the earth mother Papatūānuku, or from Maui’s nose bleed bloodied jawbone, our exposure to the surface and subsequent isolation by ocean has some interesting consequences for the things that live here.
It turns out that many of the animals and plants found in New Zealand are quite different from living things found anywhere else in the world. There are living things in New Zealand that you don’t find anywhere else - around 80% of our native ferns, flowering plants and conifers and about 70% of our native birds are endemic - and there are a whole load of things that are common elsewhere that we don’t have at all.
As a consequence of our isolation bats are our only New Zealand native mammals. No other mammals were able to cross the 2,000km of ocean to reach New Zealand. The absence of mammalian predators like rats meant that the birds that were able to reach our shores established themselves in many of the environments usually occupied by mammals in other countries. We ended up with a whole bunch of New Zealand endemic animals with quite unusual characteristics.
Our native birds and insects are noted for being; unusually long living, slow breeding, flightless, gigantic and occupying weird habitats.
For example, we have a parrot, the Kea, that makes its home in the mountains, a blue duck which thrives in the torrential flow of mountain streams and a weta (a flightless grasshopper) that lives in caves. Many of our birds and insects are flightless - the weta, kakapo parrot, kiwi, takahe, and the (now extinct) moa. Our bats might glide to the ground but they climb the trunks of trees to get back up. Others species like the New Zealand pigeons, kākā, kōkako, kākāpō, takahē, lizards, snails and moa are extraordinarily slow to reproduce. We have unusually large numbers of giant species, including the world’s biggest parrot, (kakapo), giant earthworms, huge land snails, mega centipedes and the weta that is one of the heaviest insects in the world. Our fossil records let us claim the world’s largest bird, the largest moa species weighed in at well over 100kg, and a giant eagle, Haast’s eagle.
We also have a number of archaic or primitive living things. The best known is probably the tuatara - the only living example of a group of reptiles that existed 200 million years ago, but we have other archaic organisms - Peripatus, sometimes described as a living fossil, is a small animal found in rotting logs which has links to both the annelid worms and the insects and our primitive insects include types of dragonfly, moth and cranefly.
These differences, the high endemism, gigantism, flightlessness, slow breeding, long living, habitat diversification and missing species are a consequence of the isolation of New Zealand from other land masses a very long time ago. And they have such interesting consequences for the plants and animals we have today I cannot help but make an analogy about the benefits of being able to develop in isolation with the potential McDonaldisation of our thinking that could result from our relentless desire to connect everyone through technology.
The McDonaldisation effect of our more recent connections on our species diversity has already been noted
"If you go to New Zealand, you'll feel like you're in England," she continues. "You'll see blackbirds and chaffinches." Indeed, 36 of New Zealand's 113 species of land birds have been introduced by humans, notes Strahm's colleague Mick Clout, a New Zealander who heads the IUCN's Invasive Species Specialist Group. "The biodiversity of birds in New Zealand is as high as it's ever been," he adds. "But we've lost the moa [a large, flightless relative of the kiwi], we've lost the biggest eagle the world's ever seen, and we've gained the sparrow and the starling."
It is of course possible to avoid being McDonaldised as an individual without submerging and isolating yourself on the technological equivalent of Zelandia for 55million years. You just have to be ever alert to valuing the uniqueness of the individual. Stephen Downes well describes the tensions in this in his latest post on individualism and classism
I subscribe to Kant's dictum, that each human is an end in and of him or her self, and not a means to some other end.
My epistemology is based, not on atomism, but rather, on a sense of connectedness between interacting individuals, each of which brings its own uniqueness, its own perspective, to the mix. This allows me on the one had to argue against the all-encompassing darkness of classism, that is, any philosophy that subsumes the individual under some notion of class, race, nationality, religion, or whatever, while at the same time being very clear about the way in which individuals are mutually interdependent. Downes
The “all-encompassing darkness of classism” ( a lovely descriptor) is hard to avoid in education, especially when so much of our MoE educational policy, budgeting and decision making refers to personalisation but is framed upon things that are easily characterised and captured as data – those gross demographics of – decile ranking, class and locale, race, sex, sexuality, physical and mental characteristics, culture, languages, gender, family, affinity, personality
Valuing the uniqueness of individual practice and thought is worth persevering with in education. If you think about it when any one of these demographic characteristics (that are used by the MoE to make generalisations and predictions about educational outcomes and evidence based best practice) are intersected by life world attributes of life experience/ interests and orientations/ values/ dispositions sensibility/ communication interpersonal styles etc etc we introduce differences within the gross demographic data that are greater than the difference between –
I can also see how classism introduced through data collection based upon gross demographics is exacerbated by our use of technology to find and form self referential groups “to belong to” (“to be subsumed by” if you like) rather than using the connectivity of technology to nurture the individual and his or her interdependence –
How we use technology based classism in our educational practice could well lead future visitors to New Zealand schools to observe
"If you go to New Zealand, you'll feel like you're in England," "The diversity of teaching and learning in New Zealand is as high as it's ever been," he adds. "But we've lost the educational equivalent of the moa [a large, flightless relative of the kiwi], we've lost the biggest eagle the world's ever seen, and we've gained the edu_tech equivalent of the sparrow and the starling."
I realise that my geology and physical geography only extend to the continent or isles of NZ and mainly Wellington fault line
Prof Mackenzie my guide with black and white aerial photos
I have met a tuatara at Victoria university when I was at college
I know little re Lord Howe rise etc
I like your use of metaphor comparing animals and birds to those in education system -all interconnected
Thanks for giving me food for thought
One of my unknown passions is to track earthquakes occurrence to look for patterns and there are patterns
I will be in a city in August and hope that no earthquakes occur at the hotel opposite Te Papa
Living in this town as a child , meant I always knew that our land would rise on our side of harbour and the city would sink in an earthquake
Keep up your thought provoking ideas re science as science as a school subject is suffering currently
Cheers Vicky
Posted by: vicky | July 12, 2008 at 06:45 PM
Thanks for the thumbs up Vicky ... I was convinced that I had let this post run away by itself AND that no one in the blogosphere would ever persevere and read it all ... let alone read it all, think of a response, and add a comment as you have ... staying so close to Te Papa will be fun ... if the reason for your Wellington visit proves tiresome you can always escape somewhere that is overstuffed with new thinking ... I love the library at Te Papa
... and I will, I will, I will keep alert to any links to earthquake patterning whilst I work on the textbooks
Posted by: Artichoke | July 12, 2008 at 09:28 PM