KEYNOTE 2 Karen Melhuish-Spencer Karen was - quite simply - inspiring. Talking to '[her] people' she dealt gentle provocation to us all. She kept us thinking 'so what?' pushing us further in our educational/pedagogical thinking. She addressed the issues we all relate to. Her first comment was to encourage us to tweet, to blog, to use the Todaysmeet backchannel she set up. This caused some interesting fallout. Lots of people found it a distraction but couldn't stop using it. It was an effective way of communicating that is not as 'full-on' as Twitter can be at times. A gentle way in if you like. Like it or not this is a legitimate way to process at conferences now. Adapt or be left behind....Karen discussed digital learning and our students. Changes in the way we use language. Is English still a relevant learning area? How can we evolve? How can we push ourselves forward rather than stand still. English, according to Karen, has never been more important for preparing our students for their 'NOW' worlds. Wednesday evening was spent in the Library Bar on Courtney Place. Delightful! THURSDAY WORKSHOP 4 SELF SELECTION IN LEVEL 3 - OPT IN NOT OUT. Great idea! We are always looking for ways for our students to have their needs met by the course they choose. Basic foundation of NCEA is that courses are designed to meet the needs of the community in the school - and ours is different from the school down the road and the school over the bridge.... and so on. So ARE we meeting the needs of our students specifically OR are we applying the one size fits all model. If we just throw generic tasks from TKI, designed by someone in another school - or a building not even IN a school - then how can they possibly fit our specific community? AND how does one course fit all students in a cohort anyway? I have been pondering these questions - and not quietly either- for a number of years. SO I thought this workshop might be fairly interesting. It was run by a teacher (Julia Woods) from Wellington Girls College.... our hosts. Decile 9/10 same as us at WGHS....so I was interested in their journey. So Julia explained to us how they use Moodle and GoogleDocs to achieve this. The school uses Google Calendar and the students enter their courses and assessment dates on the calendar and are then bound by them. Does it mean marking looks different? YES. One person is responsible for marking each standard in their option line. This helps with consistency and means that the marking comes in over the entire year rather than in big chunks. No more authenticity issues than in the old system were encountered. The teachers in this programme co-teach. The learning spaces are large and accommodate roughly 50-60 students at a time. This also enables several standards to be taught at one time in small groups much like tutorial sessions. The students work their deadlines in around other school assessments. They also chools the METHOD of assessment. Their buy-in means they have no comeback. If they have already set the date their assessment will be due in, they cannot argue that the date is not able to be met. This also helps students who are absent for 'approved leave' times. Saves extensions. Results have shown a marked improvement. Really interesting concept. Teachers have to know their standards. Students have to make their choices after the first week of year 13. They spend that first week in large groups talking with the staff and watching videos made by staff which promote the courses/standards. Each staff member is responsible for making a promotional video for a standard. Those videos are available on the school YouTube channel. Students choose as many or as few credits as they need and may choose internally or externally assessed standards or a mixture of both. The Conference Dinner at Macs Brewery was very nice thank you! Nothing like a bit of a party! DAY 3 FRIDAY 10 JULY WORKSHOP 6 Forgiving the Unforgivable Character - Vanessa Scott took us on a tour of how we respond to unforgivable characters - ones like Kevin in 'We Need To Talk About Kevin' and 'A Clockwork Orange' and various other morally challenging texts. Are we CONDITIONED to find a villain? Do we have certain expectations of characters? We should as ourselves: Who challenges us? How do they challenge us? Why are we challenged by this particular character? When passing judgments about characters are we not in fact the villain ourselves? The Chief Executioner? "Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?" Which characters should,we emulate? With back stories, evil characters seem less evil. Empathy wins. It's a vicious cycle where readers blame the villain. When confronted with two villains, we blame the bigger villain. When a text evokes an angry response like 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', we focus on sadness to eliminate judgement/blame. We cannot totally condemn a character as there may be a bit of them in us. The novel is NOT as much about the character's journey as it is about OURS. ALL of these questions she raised felt like potential Level 3 Essay topics! | DAY 1 WEDNESDAY 8 JULY KEYNOTE 1 Glen Colquhoun In a really amazing Keynote ("A small prayer meeting on a Wednesday morning") or the alternative title "Songs for Pakeha to sing at powhiri" Our country has two poetries: one is written in English, the other is spoken, chanted and sung in Maori. The two do not often connect. Glen Colquhoun SANG his poems to us. Poems from his collection Myths and Legends of the Ancient Pakeha. The first time powerpoint presenter was self effacing and apologised for singing to us. But it was really inspiring to hear him talk about the links between haka and sea shanties as he wove a tale of our collective past. Poetry in English has its own oral tradition - sea shanty, lullaby, songs etc. "There are many volumes of pakehatanga left unsung." "I like to think these songs are really an old form of medicine." Great stuff. And he can sing. Sang us a moteatea 'composed by Captain Cook on first making landrall in Aotearoa' There was barely a dry eye in the house! WORKSHOP 1 - For me this was "We must listen to Poets" Strategically planning a 5 year English programme. Presenter Linda Stockholm Essentially she talked about how Scholarship Markers' advice is to treat the whole 5 year programme as leading to Scholarship in terms of reading material. Wide reading of the right kind - ie really great sci fi, quality non fiction, poets are critical from Donne to Baxter, Tuwhare, Colquhoun and don't forget Mansfield, adult graphic novels as well as our favourite contemporary texts SHOULD be taught or at least made freely available to students and we should be prepared to talk about all genres with our intended Schol students. "Choices for English" is a useful departmental resource ($115) a YA reading guide. Close reading is essential - UNFAMILIAR IS IMPORTANT Use a formula - Device + Effect + Say Something about it. Choose extracts from texts you are studying - if it's not relevant they wont engage. Random extracts don't generally work. SCAFFOLD. Start with single tasks build up over the year. Start lessons with some technical immersion in the text being studied - helps you get mileage out of the text and helps students engage on several levels. It is important to focus on academic writing - concise, poetic but in a highly restrained way - no point in writing 5 pages of turgid, repetitive drivel. A 5 year programme means you may have to look at ONE thing a term that is currently NOT making a difference and STOP doing it. Get student feedback on this. Most staff should be aiming to deliver 2 high intensity lessons per week per class. THAT is feasible. We see each class for (roughly) 100 hours over a year. What do we cover in those 500 hours? Do we cover a wide range of genres? Do we allow our Schol students to look back over 5 years and remember a grunty text from each level? FEEDBACK - what are we using? Verbal and written. Be minimalist with marking - one comment on what went well - one comment on where to next. Formative feedback must be timely. No point in waiting 3 weeks to get work back. USE PEER FEEDBACK - it has value! 2x a term there should be a pressured writing task - give the topic in advance and see if students can express themselves under assessment conditions. Don't overmark it. - 2 comments - what went well and where to next. WORKSHOP 2 This one was on YA Fiction - Blurring the lines. It was presented by Ruth and John McIntyre from The Children's Bookshop in Kilbirnie -who were looking at the use of controversial or perceived as controversial texts... Some texts they suggested: Boys Don't Cry - Malorie Blackman which challenges the default position of a white protagonist Asking for It - Louise ONeil - an Irish setting dealing with social media shaming of a rape victim - 14 yrs + Smashed - Mandy Hager - A girl raped by her brother's best friend with revenge/utu issues raised. Senior text. I Am Not Esther - Fleur Beale - one of the best junior fiction texts around. I Am Rebecca - Fleur Beale - the follow up to Esther and coming this September - Being Magdalene - the third in the series. They suggested a wide range of texts including "Sick Lit" eg Fault in Our Stars type texts LGBTQI literature - a growing market - awareness raising. Shock Books Suicide Cults And 'Literary Reads' One point they raised. PLEASE recategorise The Fat Man. It is NOT a junior text. Move it. It is still being taught at junior levels and should NOT be. It is no longer being sold as a junior text. FULL list is with Aneta or Megan Davidson (library) Most texts are in our library or on order! Thursday July 9 DAY 2 Workshop 3 I was presenting! Longtime listener - First time presenter.... The topic was 3.6 The Visual Essay and how to teach it without losing your mind. Good start. A room full of 30 people gathered to listen! Resources are available on the conference website Capital Letters password is 2015shifT KEYNOTE 3 Bernard Beckett Bernard Beckett is a YA writer from Wellington and his keynote was quite brilliant. He threw out the challenge - WHY DO WE TEACH OUR SUBJECT? He talked about how important it is to get our students thinking and trying on various identities through texts. Turns out that exam results and compliance culture aren't what English is all about - like we didn't know that anyhow - but frankly you can't say it often enough to me! And yet he was VERY funny. His take on the jobs we do or don't do... "Marking the roll - in the first 10mins - most probably not. Priority list depends on how scary the end user is!" and "The Ministry could do with more mathematicians working there" "If your idea of your job is to get good grades for your students it is, I think, soul-withering." Couldn't agree more Bernard! We need more than this as incentive. We are advocates for taking that journey, living vicariously through texts. Being lifelong learners through reading. We owe it to our students to pass this on. Of course not all of them will respond with the enthusiasm we have for our subject - but that should NOT stop us! "There is so much that is incredibly valuable and rich that only the English teacher does." How many times have colleagues in other subjects told me that they WISH they could work discussions on moral standings or minority rights or oppression of women into their classes - tricky with Maths and Sciences - easier with Social Sciences - but its the everyday norm in our English classrooms - those discussions you never realised you were going to have with your class. The responses to provocation in the texts you read.... Seriously - how much fun do we have? It's wicked! We pose and then attempt to solve the world's problems in class then have lunch and do it all again! How cool are we? If I wasn't already an English teacher I would seriously want to be! All that AND we get to read books! Thanks Bernard! I came out of your Keynote feeling much better about myself and what I do! WORKSHOP 5 Poetry is Necessary - Ramon Narayan from South Auckland Poets' Collective This was awesome. The time to step outside our comfort zones and write and read out poetry. Ramon and Lauren took us through some graduated, carefully designed steps to writing and performing our own poems. The biggest stretch of the conference for me! SO many ideas - so many helpful resources. The full set can be downloaded from their website. The resource link is on this page It was challenging but lots of fun. KEYNOTE 4 Karlo Mila To be honest I had not heard of Dr Karlo Mila before - that was clearly my loss. What an interesting Keynote! Her poetry is awesome. She is described as a poet, writer and researcher. Her PhD focusing on the culture, identity and wellbeing of NZ born Pasific populations. She talked to us about 'Mana Moana' and how the sea binds us together, stretching between all of the Pacific nations. And how 'Va' is a space that relates things together. She spoke to us of Urbanesia and having not just Cultural Swag but POLYcultural Swag. Who wouldn't want to be part of more than one culture? But she talked about our students as being born in New Zealand and thus disconnected from their multiple Pasifika cultures. Speaking from her own experience of growing up in Palmerston North she reminded us that 'Trying to fit into someone else's story sucks" Almost anyone who has attended Victoria University will have had some relationship with Colin McCahon's painting 'I AM'. I certainly remember it. Karlo told us she spent her time wanting to write NOT after it. |
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Thanks Wellington! My old hometown - you did us proud. Thanks too to Wellington Girls College and the NZATE committee for putting on a great Conference.