Week+3+-+Jessica+Walsh


 * Issues Week 3 - So you want to be a Teacher? - 15/4/09**

In this week’s lecture, guest speaker Howard Nicholas presented the topic, “So you want to be a teacher?” Dr Nicholas presented us with several views of education. For example, we were shown a video of Pink Floyd’s film clip “The Wall”, depicting the education system as boring, mundane, repetitive and institutionalised. Another view was that of Jamie Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant. Mr Escalante taught in a school back in the 1970’s in Los Angeles where drugs, gangs and violence were part of students’ daily life. Using his creativity, and vowing to never give up, he managed to motivate the students to learn calculus and ultimately pass the calculus exam. Mr Escalante had a view of education and teaching that was strikingly different to that of Pink Floyd. He was passionate, innovative and proud to be a teacher.

The common theme in the lecture was to prompt us as pre-service teachers to think about what our view of teaching is. What is our view of content? What is our view of the physical world? What is our view of the Spiritual and Ethical world? What is our theory of learning and teaching and the relationship between the two? Thomas Ryan’s article “When you reflect are you also being reflexive?” explores this notion of reflecting on the self and your actions as a means to self development in a teaching context. Ryan also makes the distinction between reflection and reflexivity. To be reflexive, “teachers investigate their reactions via introspection as they occur.” To be reflective means to, “reflect on various elements (verbal, nonverbal, feelings and thoughts) following the action” (Thomas Ryan).

Ayers (2001) discusses what it means to be a teacher from his personal perspective in his article “Beginning: The Challenge of Teaching.” He goes on to explore common myths about teaching and offers research and opinions to discredit them. Like Thomas Ryan, Ayers (2001) also suggests that part of teaching involves deciding who you want to be in a teaching context, what your values are and how you want to conduct yourself in your interactions with students.

Rogers and Freiberg’s (1994) perspective is quite different and suggests that teachers need not focus on the actual act of teaching but on the “facilitation of learning.” Rogers and Frieberg (1994) defines facilitation of learning as, “how, why and when the student learns and how learning seems and feels from the inside.” It is suggested that certain conditions facilitate learning, the most important being the attitude of the teacher towards their relationships with students (transparent realness). Rogers and Frieberg (1994) point out that research suggest that individuals who hold these attitudes are reported as being effective in the classroom.

Jessica Walsh