July 4th - Summer Institute

I apologize for the lateness of this post.  I have and still have no power or internet.  More about that in my next posting.

“The mission of art is to bring out the unfamiliar from the most familiar.” – Khalil Gibran

In listening to Keynote speaker, Cheryl McLean, I found her topic around creative arts in research and practice to be engaging and thought provoking.  As an elementary teacher in a rural community, I think it is SOO important to broaden student culture and encourage social change.  As Howard Gardner and many other educational scholars believe, it is impossible to foster creativity in students when they are simply working for marks.  Students need opportunities to work collaboratively and use collaborative circles to work towards a common goal.  I find that this is often most successful as well, when students have control over their topic and how they will show what they have learned.  For example, when students are able to choose a topic that is important to them, and choose how they will present their topic in an interesting and engaging way, the results are often spectacular.  Here is a really cool example of a way in which students used technology (PhotoVoice) and created a project about social change.

Link to student PhotoVoice Project

With technology evolving at the rate it is, there are SO many options for students to use their creativity in a number of different ways.  Students could use PhotoStory, Windows Movie Maker, or even other apps like PicCollage, CloudArt, Toon Camera, Audicity to record songs… (really the options are endless!), to create movies, posters, poetry, etc. to help foster social change within their communities or schools.  Thinking about what I know about Grade 3 & 4 curriculum guides, there are a wide variety of outcomes around conserving habitats (and kids LOVEEEE animals), active transportation, anti-bullying and other mental health related outcomes for students to draw from. 

I think that as educators, we need to use what we know about technology to help us foster creativity in students, as it would appear the evolution of creativity is where education is heading in the future.

Here are a few snippets of what I took from the final two presentations, “Dealing Honestly with Race and Class” and “Close Encounters: Counselling, The Prompting, The Preparation, The Practice.”

One of the first activities we did in the presentation about race and class was an activity I have actually done before, in which you are expected to make judgments about a person you do not know, based solely on what you can see.  Although many people found this activity awkward and uncomfortable, I found it quite hilarious.  I was the “stranger” and was having the assumptions made about me.  Shockingly, the girls were almost bang on in their assumptions, basically because they were about the same age as myself and wrote down what they liked.  The point of this activity was to notice the impact of your assumptions, and how the assumptions we make have an impact on how we understand people.
We also watched this Michael Kimmel video on gender.  

SPOILER ALERT: Basically, through this video and a similar activity on how we identify ourselves, we noticed that race and gender are visible to people who are not the minority (or another way of saying that is – Race is visible to people who do not look like everyone else) and privilege is invisible to those who have it.

Dr. Sumara’s presentation was a nice change in pace, as he has an extremely calming presence and way of speaking.  He basically discussed the role of school guidance counsellors and how for students, the counselling relationship represents:
1- Availability (which after he wrote in brackets – “I’ll be there for You” and then I had this song in the my head for the rest of the presentation - for all you Bon Jovi fans out there!)
2- Respect
3- Truthfulness
4- Trust
It was very interesting to take in his expertise on how counselling relationships work and exist within the schools, because there was no guidance counsellor at the school I worked in this year, and I felt that many of these responsibilities fell to the classroom teachers.  It is unfortunate that the powers that be do not see this role as important, and have instead starting hiring out these services to groups like “Schools Plus” who are not in the building often and can only offer services to specific students based on needs and parental consent.