Get Off The Pendulum
Can’t say a huge amount because it’s politically sensitive, but our new 4 year Middle Years of Schooling1 teacher education degree has been changed to meet the requirements of the teacher certifying body in Queensland, the Queensland College of Teachers. We were planning to have minor teaching fields that would allow teachers to concentrate on a particular area like science, maths or the arts, but they required a much stronger focus on numeracy and literacy, in addition to the already very strong program in those areas that we had, so the minors have had to be scrapped for more subjects in those fields.
To me this is a symptom of a current pendulum swing – the media have created the perception that there is a crisis of literacy and numeracy among Australian students. All the evidence shows that this is not the case, and that in fact more students are literate and numerate at a higher level than ever before. But politicians have to be seen to be responding to community concerns, real or not, so there is this massive emphasis on literacy and numeracy to the exclusion of everything else. Science, for example, has always struggled for time in the primary curriculum, but it is being displaced even further at the moment.
Of course, eventually the imbalance will be recognised, and we’ll swing back toward a more balanced perspective – but most teachers only go to university for their first degree, so those prepared in these next few years will have somewhat unbalanced preparation to teach.
It’s the same with teaching science ‘in context’ – connecting it to real world examples and situations – versus teaching it purely in terms of science concepts and the structure of the discipline. The latter used to be the only approach used, and it didn’t work for everyone. The smart approach would have been to add some contextual teaching to complement the conceptual teaching, and get the best of both worlds. Instead, the pendulum has swung all the way in the opposite direction, so all the teaching is in context. That suits some people, but disadvantages others, including Cassie.
The idea of the ‘golden mean’ – finding balance between opposites, rather than embracing either – is as old as the Greeks, but I think we grasp it less now than for a long time. We live in a(n over)reactive world.
- Oh, incidentally, as of a couple of days ago, meet the new Director of Middle Years Teacher Education at the University of Queensland. A small but satisfying promotion for me.