My fervour for social change and the sheer joy I get from working with marginalised communities led me on an expedition to Mae Ra Moe Refugee Camp in June, 2015. I had taken the year off after graduating with a postgraduate diploma of teaching from the University of Melbourne in 2014. When all of my classmates frantically raced to find teaching positions for 2015, I decided to instead spend a year building up my social development portfolio, involving myself with community work both at home and abroad, and well, taking a bit of a break before launching into full time employment.
"Giving staff the right level of challenge coupled with the adequate support and autonomy led to success"
After uni ended I got a job managing a cafe in my local area which surprisingly turned out to be very much like teaching. Exploring my managerial skills, I discovered that by tapping into my staff's prior knowledge and skills and allowing them to build upon those skills in a professional manner, I was encouraging stronger work ethics and fostering an environment of productivity. Giving staff the right level of challenge coupled with adequate support and autonomy led to success and transformed the workplace from being a place of deficit discourses, to positive ones.
"I learned the power and importance of listening, and seeking first to understand before being understood"
Whilst working at the cafe I also became involved with a Family Inclusive Language and Literacy program in Maidstone where I volunteered one day a week in their after school tutoring program. I worked with migrants to Australia, many of them refugees, and tutored children between the ages of five and eighteen. In this context relationship building was just as vital as the development of knowledge and skills. I fostered relationships with the entire families of my students, and I learned the power and importance of listening, and seeking first to understand before being understood.
During this time I also tutored a year 12 English student in my area and assisted her with SAC preparation and general learning skills. As opposed to focussing solely on the task at hand (often the upcoming SAC), I attempted to broaden her thinking using developmental taxonomies and ideas learned through the Patrick Griffin, Assessment For Teaching program. For example, whilst preparing for an essay we would not only examine the key concepts of the text - but I would ask her questions to provoke inquiry and use a SOLO taxonomy to encourage her to reach broader levels of thinking, or "the extended abstract".
Solo Taxonomy
In May, I became aware of the Karen ethnic minority of Myanmar and their struggles in refugee camps along the Thai/Myanmar border. Using twitter, I got in touch with an independent volunteer who frequented one of the camps, and he put me in touch with friends at the Karen Women's Organisation (KWO), who then arranged an extended camp permit for me to go and teach in one of the high schools for three weeks. I set off, unsure of what to expect, on the 1st of June, 2015.
Mae Ra Moe Camp
Mae Ra Moe is a refugee camp that is wedged among the stunning mountain ranges of the Thai/Myanmar border. It is home to over 20,000 Karen (ethnic minority) people and has 4,000 students spread across three high schools, two middle schools and five primary schools. The Karen people who live there have fled the Burmese military and their oppressive regime after years of terrorisation. To read a personal account of the situation, click here
When arriving at camp, I was put up in High School Number 1 in "Section 5A" where I would be teaching Year 12 English. I was welcomed by the local teachers and principal, all Karen refugees themselves, and as the only foreign person in camp, I was the subject of much interest and inquisition. I was instantly struck by how little the school had to work with. I had previously taught English in "poor" countries such as Cambodia, but nothing compared to life in camp. The classrooms were basic, open bamboo structures with a chalkboard at the front. Students were equipped with donated exercise books, pencils and rubbers, and some had rulers. I raided the "supply room" of the high school but found no coloured pencils or crayons, no glue or scissors or textas. This was the bare minimum, and I was thankful that I had thought ahead to bring textas, blue tack, scissors, sticky tape and other resources with me.
Standard classroom
Students crossing the river to school
I spent my first day observing classes and chatting to the local teachers. I looked through the English curriculum and textbooks from other subject areas. It became apparent very quickly that the local teachers acted mostly as translators between the textbooks (mostly in English or Burmese) and their students who spoke and read in Karen. The teachers had no tertiary education and merely read ahead in their textbooks in order to teach. They had never learned about pedagogical styles or learning theories, and the students were bored senseless after a long day of learning (often starting at 6am and finishing at 4:30).
I was also undertaking research into anti-oppressive education for the final 50 points of my Masters and was reading much poststructuralist, critical and anti-oppressive theory in my down-time. With this framing my consciousness, I began working within a cycle of praxis where I integrated anti-oppressive concepts with an amalgamation of interesting and exciting aspects of the learning theories that I thought would be the most beneficial.
I chose to focus heavily on social constructivism as students were currently receiving what Freire called the "banking theory of education" in which they were merely depositories for knowledge. In this process, students were not given the opportunity to construct information themselves, thus forming and attaching individual and social meaning to the content being learned.
Once again, I sought first to understand my students before being understood. I undertook Karen language lessons, I involved myself with school and camp life, and I engaged with my students socially outside of class. I asked for the assistance of local teachers when designing resources and used the names of famous Karen singers, heroes and politicians in activities about nouns and adjectives. For sentence structures I used locations within camp and Karen State that students could relate to, and I incorporated the hobbies and favourite sports of my students into basic literacy lessons. I found a box of coloured chalk in the supply room and with it had students create pictures of their adjectives and nouns which I then displayed on the classroom wall. I used visual aids, often staying awake late into the night creating, in order for them to more easily understand and remember new vocabulary or have an interesting activity to do the next day.
I also utilised embodied and experiential pedagogical techniques. Having a drama background and engaging with the research of embodied learning, I know all too well the beneficial effects of navigating social meaning (and meaning in general) through physicality. "To do is to learn" - and my students were up out of their seats every lesson, either acting out nouns for their classmates to guess, playing a version of celebrity heads to provoke adjectives, or doing a variety of other experiential activities.
Nouns and adjectives lesson, using a "celebrity head" activity
Sentence structuring activity
Students matching vocabulary to pictures
My classes were being well received by the local teachers and students alike. I was asked by other teachers to teach their classes as their students had heard about my pedagogy from their friends and requested the same experiences. I stopped into many classes but with a full teaching load could only focus wholly on my year 12s.
At the end of each day, true to my praxis, I would reflect on the lessons (see lesson plans and observations) and evaluate what worked and what didn't. Thinking about anti-oppressive pedagogy, I was constantly asking myself "who am I not teaching to?" and trying to shape my lessons to encompass all of my students' needs, especially those which couldn't be articulated. I consistently checked for understanding, and after an activity I would receive feedback, either in the form of raised hands "how many questions did you get right?" or written feedback; I assessed the effectiveness of my own teaching and contrived ways to improve it. I used similar techniques in order to group my students into three levels, low, medium and high, and had variations of activities and extended work for each of these levels. The high flyers of the class had to extend themselves just as much as those who struggled, and similarly to my work in the cafe, I provided high levels of challenge, with high levels of support in order to achieve positive results. I also had a local English teacher, Mar Ner, assist me with all my classes. She helped translate and carry out activities as well as becoming my best friend; With her knowledge and kindness, we co-wrote a number of lessons and I used her expertise of Karen life to create situated and meaningful classes.
Teachers hard at work lesson planning in the staff room (Mar Ner on the right)
A lesson reflection excerpt
To see a short video of my teaching at MRM camp, please click here or watch below
No comments:
Post a Comment