I have a dream...
Dear diary,
My rationale for a writing classroom has to be epic, insightful, philosophical. But where do I start?
I sincerely wish for my students to be able to seek and delight in beauty, which is what I believe is the true purpose of all art forms. The aesthetic gives us ‘an experience that allows us to understand the world more fully and experience it more richly’ (Mission & Morgan 2009, p. 50). That’s what this is all about. To fall in love with the idea of beauty, to find it in visuals, in language, in novels and films and artworks and performances; to find a sincere form of expression.
As critical literacy informs my practice, I dream of a classroom that questions, that fights back. That is interactive and questions the status quo. That asks, “What makes the literary canon?” (MacLachlan 1994, p. 18), and “Why have set texts at all?”. I want students to engage with texts beyond the literary canon. I want to ‘make use of the printed material that daily assaults the student’ (Watson 2009, p. 80), particularly social media, blogs, vlogs, advertisements, streaming media - not only reading and interpreting, but also writing, speaking and creating! I want students to engage with the ‘universe of discourse’ (Andrews 2009, p. 39) – to understand and question the values placed on some forms of writing over other – and to argue that...
I want to rid this weird culture where students feel that they shouldn’t speak unless they know the answer. Although the students in Australia aren’t told this message as explicitly as in Vanuatu where I taught (yes, below was ACTUALLY a sign in the classroom), it still troubles me that in many of my classes, students don’t speak up in fear of being wrong (Locke 2014, p. 8).
(In case you can’t read it, the sign says “Sh.....!! Silence!! Keep your mouth shut until you know what you’re talking about”) - UGH!
I want students to get it wrong, because that is when learning occurs! Mission explains it perfectly, that ‘poststructuralism undercuts this vision of glorious certainty’ (Mission 2009, p. 69), and further, I want the students to understand that certainty is a mirage, and all I care about is growth. I don’t always hold the answers. I am all too aware of the power dynamic in classrooms and hope to have a more balanced, student-centred, student-led and dialogic classroom where my position is as one of many interested readers (Andrews 2009, p. 42).
All of this is in the hope that my students will leave my classroom with their own critical understanding of the world, their place in it and the contexts which inform everything surrounding them.