Week 3 (16/10/13)

Week 3 was pretty interesting for me and it was practical too which was really exciting. It is always a mystery coming in to this lesson because I do not know what to expect.

First Part of the Lesson:
So this week we continued with the apocalypse; and was put in groups of five to plan and create an education system but also keep in mind how to feed, house, keep warm and keep these people healthy. There was three time periods of when we have to create a new education system for, 1. Just emerged from bunkers 2. Five years after the war & 3. Ten years after the war. I was in the group that had to recreate an education system Five years after the war; we had twenty minutes to discuss within our groups of how we want it to be and then pitch it to the judges which made me get super anxious. Within our group there was five roles, they were 1. A survivor who was extremely wealthy 2. An entrepreneur 3. A Trade unionist 4. A Teacher's assistant & 5. An individual who reads a lot of Freire. I had taken the role of the Teacher's assistant and my group members took the rest of the roles.

My brainstorm

Why?
I think we done the apocalypse scenario to realise that everyone in the class had different view points of how they would create an education system. Although people had diverse opinions I believe that there was a lot of similar opinions amongst my group; For example in my group we thought that there should be a classless education for all because when it does come down to the important factors of failing in education it does tend to show that the 'working class' fail. However if we did have a classless society we thought that, it would bring equality, fairness and a good education system for the future generations. For me it was really intriguing to hear all the different opinions because I didn't even think of them ideas myself; so it was really great to just discuss and hear new ways of improvement people want for the education system. Another thing that I loved about this discussion was that me and my group got personal and deep with our opinions and even talked about experiences that we faced either in a positive or a negative light in school or college.

What did I learn?
This lesson really helped me understand the education system a bit more because it allowed me to research on it in my own time and it showed me how I can as a future teacher help my students to go further in life and be more positive towards them because if you are constantly negative, from my own experience I know that you end up fulfilling the prophecy. I actually now know what sort of teacher I want to become and evolve to and also work with what we have at the time, referring back to the post bunker.

Second part of lesson:
This lesson got more and more exciting to me because at this point we had moved on from the apocalypse and on to making a collage. So a collage is like making a new whole by adding bits and pieces together to create new meanings and memories. There are a lot of ways to make a collage for example cubomania which is cutting pictures into squares which then resemble together some how also photomontage is also another way of making a collage.

I decided to research on the DaDa movement and also Hannah Hoch further to get some inspiration on how I want my collage to be like.

DaDa means "Hobby Horse" in French.

DaDa was an artistic movement in Europe during the World War 1. They were so angry about the War that they formed this movement in a way to escape and be against everything that made the War occur; they even went to the extent to even call themselves non-artist because they thought nothing in the world had any meaning at that point in time. DaDa had the intention to provoke a personal reaction from the audience (shock or offend). Info I got about the DaDa movement


 
 
Here is a picture that the DaDa movement received their provoking reactions at, as its the famous Mona Lisa. Marcel Duchamp had drawn a moustache.
Hannah Hoch was apart of the DaDa movement and was one of the first creators of photomontage. She considered herself as apart of the women's group in 1920. The image on the right is one that Hoch had created by combining women and men features together in a sense of equality. Info I got about Hannah Hoch

Towards the end of this lesson I got together with my peer mentor and shared why I put my collage together the way I did. The reason is because  I really fell in love with the picture that Hannah Hoch put together because it inspired me to make one just like it so I can show that social class in the education system between students and teachers are equal and everyone gets treated the same because to me the way you get treated in school, college or university almost determines the grade you achieve. I used newspaper and also magazines to create my collage to brighten it up and make it look interesting. I hoped that my audience saw my collage and thought it was stimulating n a way because at the end of the day I believe that the education system is lacking equality.

Week 2 (09/10/13)

So OMG! I finally met Tom and my god is he a character or what? This was my first time meeting him as I wasn't in the previous lesson and I was honestly shocked IN A GOOD WAY. I love his accent and his dress sense because that makes him very memorable and everything he says I can literally remember it because I learn in a weird way.

Anyway.. In the beginning of this lesson Tom had recapped the introduction again (Thank god) which enabled me to catch up to the rest of the class. The introduction included very important information such as the deadlines for the assignments, also SOCCER which can be a key to success, about the class blog which is on word press or any other blogging sites and becoming an educationalist and what that meant.

Moving on to the activity side of this lesson (MY FAV PART MIGHT I ADD) we had to imagine an apocalypse was coming,  and we had ten different people but only three could stay in the bunker and it was up to us as a group to choose which three could stay. All ten people had different qualities to them so this made it hard to think of which three to keep. After this we drew tools on how to be a good educationalist in groups of twos. We then swiftly moved on to mediated dialogues which included talking about topics such as 'Education is all about fitting in - knowing your place, accepting your lot in life. Some are bred for success - as for the rest - at best it bores us - at worst it teaches us just how valueless we are.' after the discussion in twos we had to draw a representation and then discuss our portraits to the class.

We was then given an article to read by Paulo Freire; so we can identify the main points he includes on becoming a good educationalist and also a good student.



Class work

My failed attempt on drawing

 

Why?

The bunker activity was really fun because I was the Atheist doctor so I felt valued and very important more than any other bunker. So after I had justified my points my group began to draw up the pros and cons of every bunker in our group and decided to keep gay scientist because he can invent things for the other two bunkers, army officer as he would be good at rationing and single pregnant woman with a five year old because she can reproduce. Once we had explained our reasons for choosing these three bunkers we soon realised that as a group we did not think outside the box because we was being very literal and thinking the worst for example one of the bunkers were disabled so straight away my group cancelled them out  however we didn't acknowledge how seriously disabled this person was, as far as we knew they could of broken a finger and be classified disabled. This showed us that we looked purely at skills and talent and automatically put the bunkers in a hierarchy of ability. I guess in a way the bunker activity showed me that as a student we are so use to being in a education system that puts us in bands of ability; without thinking twice we did the same to the bunkers.

The mediated dialogue was a way to question if the education system was either good for students or bad for them. This is debatable because in one way education IS the way forward because it teaches you the information you need to know for the career your heading to for example to become a surgeon you need to be taught how to operate, and learn where the body parts are and so forth. However you can then say that the education system is terrible in terms of social class because working class people are always no doubt labelled which makes them fail as teachers are middle class so they don't understand.

Freire's article on 'Education is being taken over by the mega rich' is focussed on Critical Pedagogy - which means that the educational movement is ushered by two things, passion and principle. These two things help students establish a consciousness of freedom and connect knowledge and truth to power, and learn to read both the word and world in a more broad way. Once I had understood the context of this article I soon realised that Freire understood how hard it can be to be working class and be a good student for example in the article it mentions "higher education - once conceptualized as a fundamental public good - has been reduced to a private good, now available almost exclusively to those with the financial means." It also amused me that Freire saw education very political because it offered students self- reflection. He later explained that pedagogy connected learning to social change as it challenged students to engage with the world, he also mentions that pedagogy does not involve training techniques and methods or political indoctrination but explains that education does provide knowledge, skills and social relations for students. Freire didn't seem biased to just his opinion on one theory in one place he tried to go all over to see if the education system is the same.

What did I learn?

I learnt to think outside the box and be more open minded; although the bunker activity was just for fun it actually opened my eyes a little about the education system, questioning the idea of are we being indoctrinated because we easily made a hierarchy of ability about the bunkers. Also Freire in a way taught me that knowledge and experience is power.

What was my reaction?

To be honest this lesson was a lot to take in. However I did enjoy knowing that different people see education differently whether that be in a good way or a bad way. Also the debated that took place in the class room gave me a better insight to other opinions of the topic.