My Practice and Community---part 2

Following the part one of my practice in community, here I add on a little more about core value of myself and my kindergarten.

Talking about core value of myself. I am believer of constructivism and supporter of community of learning. I firmly believe that children should dominant their learning, rather than teacher. Learning should be a fun process, it should be like air, you breath it everyday and can't feel any burden from it.It was impossible in old days to practice those values in traditional schools. but with the help of technology advancement, especially those technologies influenced by modern teaching theories, such as Lego, Scratch, Internet and MOOOC, It is possible to make a change. On the other hands, "teaching" under those theories are still difficult to me sometimes. Because of the long influenced by the traditional teaching theory, it is very natural to go back to old teaching in daily practice. But teaching itself means learning, isn't it. with more reflection, encouragement from my communities, and continuous learning online/offline, I believe I can make it :)


In term of core value of my working place, I list them as below:

• Respect: develop a positive feeling of esteem
• Belonging: creating connections and being part of a group
• Empowerment: celebrating every child's achievements
• Resilience: encouraging and developing the confidence to keep trying
• Enjoyment: ensuring life is fun 

Compared those value with Regio, Te Whariki from Ministry of Education and my core value, It matches each other, That is the reason why I like to work in my place now. 

In term of legal, professional regulations. I think of the big concern is safety(I will talk about it in another post "Applied Professional Ethics" in more details). Sometimes, because of lack confidence to ourselves or to children, I have to sacrifice some children's right to play,such as climbing trees, which were common in my age, for their safety reason. Sometimes, because of the professional regulations and our mixed age classroom, we had to do something which maybe not the interest to children in some age. One example is, when we do calendar or mat time for older children, younger one maybe has no interest to those since they are too young to understand this, should we keep on doing it or let the younger one attending separate activities? if yes, will the management support that? Those kinds of things bothered me sometimes. But as i said, the shift from transitional learning to modern learning is still under the way, I am sure most of the those problems will be fixed when more and more people adopted the idea of community of learning. 

Indigenous positioning within professional contexts

Language Loss and Culture Identity:

The first think popped in my brain when I read this topic is the movie "Windtalker" by Nicolas Cage.It talked about how a indigenous language--Navajo was used to encode military message in world war II. Although it is one of the extreme examples about language, but language is definitely the step stones for the society development and identity. It is about respect and confidence. I didn't have this strong feeling until I came to NZ.

Two years ago, when I and my family first came to NZ, Both my son and I met the language problem. In term of my son, he barely speak English when he just started his school. Because he can't talk and understand, he can't even figure out when to start his lunch and when to finish. For the whole week, the first question I asked him was "Have you finished your lunch?". Also, because of this culture shock reason, he was reluctant to read English book. When we went to library, the most book he borrowed is Chinese book.Even his favorite, comic, he would prefer Chinese one. I think he read most ever Chinese books in Y2013 than any years in china. :). Although he didn't speak it out, but I can feel his anxiety and hopeless at the beginning year. To him, the language barrier means disconnect of culture and no support from our old community. While for me, although I can speak English,language barrier means confidence and my identity. When i just started my teacher job in kindergarten, I tried to hide my identity and don't talk Chinese. It was because I didn't know what will be the response if I talked Chinese? Will the management accept Chinese culture? will parents accept me as a teacher if I talked some Chinese stories in the class? Those kind of thinking stopped me running some projects based on china's history and made me less confidence to show my culture identity in public. Although those living experience on us are trivial and both my son and I had went through that period, but I am pretty sure those kind of similar experiences happened to other indigenous groups. Language, as the carrier of culture, is important as air and water. We get support and confidence from it daily. Missing language diversity will definitely cause isolation and rebel between different cultures, which we has seen so many time in South African's racial segregation and racial discrimination in US.

I am very happy that NZ government took different approaches from south African and US.Since 1840, when Maori added keeping their language and culture in the Treaty of Waitangi, Culture identity had been set as one of backbone of NZ society. Although there were disturbances happened in the last hundred years, in general, I think NZ government did a very good job in this area. One obvious evidence can been seen in education. Here in school and my working place, both Maori and English are formal languages. When teacher taught numbers, they taught not only English, but also in Maori. Children will not feel embarrassing for talking another language. Accepting Maori language culture and language set a very good model for accepting other language and culture, such as china or middle east culture in the society.Going back to my son's case, assigning an Chinese speaking buddy at the beginning and providing additional ESOL class give him a big help to overcome that language barrier in the first years study in NZ.

Because of respecting to other culture and language, teachers will show more patience and more forgiveness to children from other culture. There was one case in my kindergarten. There was one girl from China and she can't speak any English word in the beginning. Rather than pushing her to try another language immediately, out teacher here gave her enough time(around 3~4 months) and patience to letting her choose her play, introducing some Chinese speaking buddies to her. For the first 3 months, she didn't talk, even in Chinese to me.Most of the time, she was just watching or seldom join in other children's play.But we knew she was not worried as she started. While 3 month later, both her parents and we found she started to talk to her buddies suddenly. If there was no patience, or respect to other culture, I don't think that amazing thing can happen.

Besides two above reasons, based on Te Whariki, Language/culture learning, or experiencing, is boring. It is living thing in daily activities. In my room, Greeting in mat time is allowed to use different language, which encouraging children confidence to their home culture. Also every year, our preschool celebrated Dawali or Chinese New Year by inviting children dressing up with their designed cloth or making dumpling themselves.

children are make their own hawaiian hula dancing

Children learned "hongi" by watching the video

Children observed Koru and tried to make their own Koru in chalk board.

Children made the costume and playing the lion dancing to celebrate Chinese new year. 

By embedding children in multi-culture environments and enjoying the differences of different cultures, children in NZ will absorb and accept those differences, which will lead to harmony society of NZ.

While in daily teaching, sometimes it is harder to let children understand another culture with traditional way, like Chinese Opera, It goes so slow and children will easily lose their patience. or Haka, some of our girl wanted to join the Haka dance like boys, we found there was less information around that area. But if we can use the modern tools, such as youtube or scratch etc, and give the power of children the right to interpret cultures/languages in their own way, that will make it more meaningful for their learning.

Indigenous positioning within professional contexts

It is a bit of difficult to explain my understanding of education of New Zealand vs my context as Asian background considering I am in this teaching role for only 1 year, But I will try my best to explain it in my own way.



Convergence.


1) Both indigenous people in NZ and China are not composed by one single groups,but many different sub-groups/races. Different from normal view of Chinese, actually there are 56 different ethnics groups in China, see below.


Distribution of 56 ethnics groups in china


Different culture and dressing of 56 ethnics groups of china

As Maori are made up by family and different clans, those ethics groups lived in different part of China and have their own chief a few hundred years ago. Although Han dominant the ethics groups in china(95% +), most of the time, all those 56 ethnics live peacefully and they also learned from each other. The communication between those 56 ethnics groups made them share some common culture and resources, and they all belongs to the emperor of China, like those small Maori sub-clans listen to chief of the Maori tribe.But in term of culture of those 56 ethics groups, they are totally different, some ethics group, such as Huizu, which believe in muslim, shared similar believing of god and laws as those countries in middle east and they still kept their own language like their ancestors. Because of those reason, balancing cultures from different ethics groups in china, especially in education is even challenge job compared to bi-culture system in New Zealand.

2) Both countries are serious at education. Actually the attitude to education in china has long history. About 2000 years ago, Confucius , the founder of Confucianism, had put a lot efforts about education and learning. Later people summarized his thinking of education as theory of value/knowledge/human nature/learning/transmission/society/opportunity/consensus. Those theories had impact education in china for thousands of years and even now it is still impacting china's education. One simple example is, Chinese culture put a lot of focus on self-reflection and self-guiding, which in general discourage collaboration learning as now days. One of the reason is because Confucius think learning is a process of observation of some type of subject matter whether it be books, objects, or people, followed by reflection, that somehow changed one.He saw learning as highly personal and therefore, highly individual activity.Because of this reason, you can possible noticed that Chinese students not actively in group/collaboration discussion. which doesn't mean they are not learning. it is just because there is different thinking about learning. While in New Zealand, respect to education is also evident in every corner of the society. But different from Chinese, the respect to education here is evident by the idea of community and involvement. One example can be brought up here. Last year, in my preschool, there are around 50 big or small activities/events in my preschool, from Dawali celebration to basic safety training from social department. In all of those activities, parents gave us very strong support and they were always very active to support or participate in those activities.

3)Both countries had put efforts to help those minor/indigenous ethics groups. In china, because most of minor ethics live in rural areas , most of the time, their economic condition are not as good as people in big cities. Some of them even cant afford basic living conditions. The idea of Chinese government is bring up their economic condition by encouraging trading, education in those area. similar things were observed at indigenous people,such as Maori, at New Zealand. But it is also because of this reason, a lot of young generations from minor ethics groups give up their language and culture and converged to accept the major ethics's language, culture, which lead to dying of their own culture.

Divergence:

1) New Zealand and China had different understanding in term of purpose of education. Hear in New Zealand, from kindergarten to university, the purpose of education is to for the well-being of individual people by enhance their belongings by empowering them. Empowerment, holistic development are key principles in any education system at NZ. Teacher encourage children to express their own ideas and create opportunities based on each children's interest. The detail subject, such as match, science are treated as tools to realize each individual's well-being. 

While in china, the aim and theory of Chinese socialist education is to provide scientific and technological knowledge so as to develop the productive forces and to meet the demands of the socialist cause. With that purpose, the education system in china take "Elite education". Students had to proof they are best by score to enroll University. Because of that reason, personality of each individuals are wiped out in china's education. You will see a lot Chinese students can have high score in test, but aimless to their life when they grow up.  

Because I was educated from that system, that kind of thinking impact me also. One example can be shared here about a science experiment teaching practices in my working place at NZ. 

A year ago, when i just started my career as preschool teacher, I saw the milk painting video online. Because it is safe and easy to use, I wanted to show our children how to play with this. Although our children was happy about the experiments, nobody ask me further about that after that show. Why? Isn't it fun. I didn't get answer until one year later when i rerun this experiment again under the topic of cyclone Pam, but this time the purpose of the experiment is to make a cyclone Pam after discussion, video watch and drawing. Because all of our children had experienced Pam in that night, children had deep involvement in this process and they still talked about the weather after the experiment. Same experiment, totally different results. I think the difference come from the purpose of education as I said before. 

one child was describing the horrible night of Cyclone Pam 

Children made the painting of Pam in their mind..dark...scrary...monster...

Children were sharing each other how to make the cyclone with milk

Children were watching the weatherman about Pam 

2) There are different attitude to science and technology learning between China and NZ kids. Sci and technology topic is one of the hot after-school topics in china.Both parents and children showed strong passions to those topic. Because the learning from area can possible link to their future job, parents and children want to learn those area in the class. While here in NZ, as the survey about community engagement at NZ, both parents and children treated this topic as one of the interesting topic as other and they preferred "play", rather than "learn" in the process. Also one interesting finding is NZ children had showed much broader interested topics, such as sports, party, hiking etc. Actually, one of the excuse of "no-show" in libraries's robot activities was children were busy at rugby or soccer and they can't make it. One of the possible reason from my understanding is reason for learning: Utilitarianism is popular in learning in china, while learning in NZ will be linked to personal development.  

• 
  

Cultural Contexts

Reflection about cultural Contexts

• How does indigenous knowledge relate to social justice?

   From my point of view, the indigenous knowledge system is an essential part of our social justice. The reason are simple, indigenous people are also part of the the our bigger society. In some point view, we possible can't fully understand their believing and knowledge system, and we think what we believe are correct. but i would say in some bigger view, a lot of their knowledge are correct and an precious part to our modern life. one example is about the relationship in Dr Apirana Mahuika's video, when industrial bring wealth and pollution to our world, we came to talk about ecology and relationship with our environment and belief, are they the exact things those indigenous people had believed for thousands of years? From those point of view, we should acknowledge that the indigenous knowledge is also part of our social knowledge and should guide our social justice as the dominant knowledge system.

• How does this relate to human rights?

  Human rights is a very broad topic. In modern society, human rights includes the rights of education, labor rights, healthy, housing etc. Although those rights had been set in law for hundreds of years in many countries, what those countries and governments did are getting further away from those basic right. such as right of housing, there are so many countries that couples had to spend 20, 30 years or even longer to buy a house to live. If that is the basic human right, shouldn't living be so difficult now. while in indigenous people's view,they had different perception about human right, actually, they see them as guardian of the lands, the air, the water etc. and they appreciate their god letting them use those resources freely. from that point of view, indigenous people put appreciation and respect into those gifts from god.  

• How can you ensure kaitiakitanga or care and protection of indigenous knowledge within teaching practice?

 First, I would like to say, ensuring children from all background and ethics living together is the step stone to make kaitiakitanga happen. Living and learning together will render our children opportunities to learn other people's culture from their view and accept the differences gradually. Secondly, respect and organize activities for each cultures are also very important in my practice. such as in Chinese New Year, We played the lion dancing and talked about difference of eastern dragon and western dragon. and in Dawali day we celebrated Indian's festival with Indian dancing. So does to Maori culture, we put Maori Haka dancing, face painting, all black ruby into our daily activities so that our children can feel the beauty of indigenous culture.

• Why is this a responsibility within Your context of practice?

 As a teacher, I need to show role model to respect all cultures from different backgrounds. Another important part is: to promote diversity of different cultures, I need to help children to experience different culture at right time. This need a lot of observation and communication with children, my workmates and even online communities. 

Applied Professional Ethics

This blog is about "Applied and Professional Ethics" by Gorgan Collste(2012).

What is "Applied Ethics", in his article, he said "applied ethics is the art or science of reflecting on moral dilemmas and moral problems in different contexts"(G.Collste, 2012). From this definition, we can understand applied ethics is about the moral adjustment of right and wrong in different social contexts. Since all of us are living in big social contexts, those social adjustments impact every corner of our society. One easy example of this impact can be seen in " Dont't be Evil" from Google. "Don't be evil" is one of the core ethics value when Google run business and made big business decision. So when Google found this value has conflict with Chinese government in term of user's privacy, they made the decision to leave china's market. Another Example is about euthanasia. Back to my home country,Euthanasia is illegal. I had read so many news that the very sick patients requested to end of their life to release their pain while Doctor have to obey the patients's willing and keep their lives. Under this situation, should Doctor follow the requests from the patients or should he follow his professional ethics to keep their pain? Those questions are exactly the area where applied ethics want to give help.

Because Applied Ethics deals with all above difficult situations in the social context, Tom Beauchamp(2003) said the philosophical method is not the only tool to treat those moral problems, some other tools can be used, such as ethical inquiry or reflective equilibrium(RE) by Rawls(1971) and Daniles(1996).

Ethical inquiry is a way to increase our knowledge of ethical issues. It started with conceptual clarity. Collecting and interpretation of different views are very constructional at ethics difficulties.  One of my example in my working place is about attitude to digital learning. While some parents welcome using digital tools in the classroom, some parents are not happy about digital tools. They complained that too much "screen time" for their children and they are not learning. While if we asked the same question to children, most children will said they love the digital tools and screen time. As an educator, should we follow children's request or should we listen to parent's suggest? Ethical inquiry (in my case, face to face talking and survey) provide help. Rather than put my personal adjustments in advance, listen to parents and children, noting down their concerns and worries give me some idea of parents why they are not happy about digital learning. Once I accept their complains, adapt my teaching practices, such as limit digital learning to a short time, using digital tools in a meaningful project or sharing children's digital creations to their parents, I receive more encouragements than complains.

Another methods the author talked about is reflective equilibrium(RE).In Rawls(1971) and Daniels(1996)'s view, "relating different aspects of an ethical problems" is central in dealing with applied ethics difficulties. In the perinatal treatment case in the article, RE approach is used to invite both the doctor and the philosopher into the process of finding a solution and both inputs will be considered. In my view, this method is trying to balance different thinking to give solutions to the problems. Going back to living case in my preschool, balancing children's safety and their learning curiosity is also a challenge for me. from learning point of view, I should let children use any opportunity to extend their curiosity as I was raised, when climbing tree is common, while on the other hands, increasing concerns from parents about their children's safety is also understandable from parents view. Balancing those two requests need our teachers to make a professional adjustments about risk and learning. It looked a simple task. Trust me, when you are facing 20 or more children and their parents, balancing will be a very challenge role. I had to admit I am still learning that skills and that is the reason why RE methods can give me some guidance in my working place.

My Practice and Community---part 1

In past 30 years, I was taught in traditional knowledge based teaching environment and actually I was doing good in that system and had never questioned that learning system until a few years ago. When I ran a workshop for children, I realized that traditional learning method doesn't fit in those new generation children, who had no interest to learn those knowledge which they can easily gain from the internet. So does my personal learning. I suddenly found although I didn't go to library as before, but I did learned daily from internet, such as Coursea, from my working place or from somewhere else.I was confronted by this challenge, if school doesn't fit in the learning need, how and where should children learn? what is the teacher's role in this learning mode. This question puzzled me until until I finished my study and worked in a kindergarten at NZ. The idea of "Community of practice" is key.

In community learning theory by Lave and Simens(), COP is defined as "group of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." My personal understanding to learning at COP is: Children can learn more actively and in a meaningful way if they can find or build up their communities. As a teacher in community, the main task has been transformed from knowledge transfer to community builder and facilitator. The relationship of children, community and teacher can be simplified as relationship between seed(children), garden(community) and gardener(teacher).As long as gardeners build and sustained the garden, the seed find their way and grow to a big tree one day. Because of this reason, context of each community is very important for children's learning.


When I looked at my working place again from the view of community of practice, the single working place has transformed to a much wider communities.Here I list context and learning of each community.

• First, Let me introduce the physical layout and design of my kindergarten. here are some photos.

This photo showed us the craft/creation corner in our room, we just re-layout that corner to make crafting convenient and enlightening so that children can try their creations easily anytime in that corner. Most crafting materials and tools had been setup that can be easily approached by children themselves. Considering preschool children's age, sometimes also work together with older children to create working manual, such as above "light saber making" manual for younger children's reference. 

Based on constructivism theory, learning is a positive loop with imagine,create,play, share, reflect process. To enhance children's sharing, a "Proud of Wall" was setup to let chidlren share what they are proud of, which in turn boost their active learning. 

Internet is one of the key element in my kindergarten's context. We use computer and online service a lot to do some research or game play, which extended children's learning to a much wide area. 

 The good context need always echo to imagination from children. When a lot of our children showed interest to make "superhero or frozen" wearable, we create this living "wearable art" corner to capture their creations, children visit that place frequently to gain idea from others sharing.

The above photos just give you a glimpse of the physical context of my working place. Actually, there are more than those photos. Such as our outside playground had been layout to encourage children to explore and interact with nature. And Toys are setup to encourage their team playing, Even the outside weekly visiting dump truck can also be part of the context which children got idea of re-cycling and put it into their block game playing as below.

Being meaningful is very important in the community learning and community context design. I can share one of my learning when I just started to work as kindergarten teacher. At that time, I saw a video about making milk painting with milk,food coloring and dish detergent,which was very cool in my view. So in the next day, I copied the idea and made the same run at my preschool room and was expecting Wow from our children. But actually they didn't. After watching my show, children ran away. Why? One year later when I was inspired by the cyclone Pam and tried to link that experiment to simulate cyclone Pam and our daily weather report again, I received the excitements from our children because it is hooked up to their life finally. 

• Parents are also a big context of my community. As as teacher, We will not be successful without parents support. When we ran "Topic news" to help children talk and communicate, a lot of time we need our children to bring the objects(toys or suits) or photos into our classroom. When we ran fund raising in "Daffodils Day", we need permission to get their children outside of preschool.All those projects can't be successful unless get our parents supports. But parents involvements are not simply treated as help only. In our eyes, we think the messages we want to send out to our children in those involvement are: we are all part of the bigger community and help them to learn social responsibility in those living experience. By involving children themselves in all poster or biscuit making, fund raising etc in real life, the impression of social responsibility in our children is better than any teaching in classroom. (this is also one of the key missing part in my home country, where parents had much less involvement in social activities with children). The right attitude and active involvement from parents gave vivid model to our children. Because of that reason, building and maintaining a smooth relations between parents and teachers is a big part of job. Besides feedback parents the progress of their children daily, we also ran regular family activities, such as "Parents Day" to boost that relationship.

• The outside communities around my working kindergarten also , such as library, SPCA, fire department,extends the learning to outside preschool. Every week, children will get chance to visit the local library, where they had schedule kids story time. Children also learned how to read and follow the traffic light while walking outside and how to behavior in a public place.Frequently visit from fire department and SPCA rendered the children emergency skills in a fun way in their early age. All those activities help to build up children's sense of belonging and identity. And by situated in those living experience, knowledge is not abstract and symolic, but is provisonal, mediated and socially-constructed.(Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Blacker, 1995)

SPCA visit with guiding dog

Children after library visit was playing the cars and simulating the traffic jam in their play. 

•  Above contexts and communities are very important for me to be a teacher.but that is not enough for me. Going back to my personal life, I was surrounded by online learning communities, such as Coursera, Edx and my maker space community. Those online communities help me to keep on building my knowledge on demand and keeping my personal learning fun. 

I was teaching at maker space in shanghai

As Lave(1996) said, learning in community is not limited to "isolated" schools and treated as individual's psychological process, but is treated as socially situated learning. All above contexts enriched the learning process and make it more fun. In most of the processes, you possible can't see traditional teaching as I experienced 30 years ago, or maybe you will not thinking we are teaching,but under the big contexts, children and myself are learning anywhere, anytime without feel any traditional boring feeling. That is just the beauty of the community learning. The learning and working experience here totally transformed my view of learning and teaching. Actually, I am trying to avoid using "teaching" now because as a teacher in communities, our major role had stepped back from the dominant knowledge source and direct teaching to the community facilitators.It also released me from focusing on teaching to observing, thinking, facilitating and guiding in my daily life.Only thing left for community teacher to do is: wait and be patient, watching the growth of children under the magic power of community learning...:)

Introduction to my reflective portfolio

Hello, Everyone, I am Ted. Before 2013, I had been living at shanghai in semiconductor industry for 10 years. 4 years ago, I accidentally bumped into makerspace in shanghai, which not only switched my career from engineering to education, but also took me to New Zealand in 2013. Now I am a full time kindergarten teacher, part time students for my "digital and collaboration learning" study at Mindlab by Unitec and part time maker and gardener at my secret corner. 

But study with full time job is not a easy job. After almost 8 months study, It came to the end of my study. The journey of learning was fulled of fun and hard work,especially when I am still doing full time job. Working at kindgarten, rather than primary school or middle schools made the practice even harder.In some point, I thought of giving up, but I made it. Yeah!!! A big high five to me :)


Although there were several blogs, video, presentations being published about my learning, there were no systematic collections of my learning reflections to my practices in my kindergarten. This blog is specially created to document the reflection to the learning from "Digital and Collaboration Learning" course from MindLab by Unitec.