to my learners, or what Boal speaks
about - how do you make your spectators your spec-actors?
How do you make them the protagonists or the agents of knowledge construction?
My learning has been how to let that go and let my learners feel that they
are the agents in the knowledge construction.
>> It's a scary thing, when I think if I was to advise teachers to just let go.
That's something you have to learn and you
have to have a huge amount self-confidence,
and I would never say to a beginning teacher, "Let go"
because thereby lies disaster, doesn't it?
I'm trying to remember the name of the theorist who wrote a
lot about this great thread of anxiety that runs through teacher's lives,
of discipline, keeping in control,
because the minute you let go - and it was the first
advice to me from my head of department, "Never, never let it go Mr. MacBeath".
>> But that's taken me 25 years to find it, and that's been my learning process.
>> Our third question is, why do we need to have a philosophy of teaching?
>> A philosophy of teaching, that sounds so grand doesn't it?
Do you have a philosophy of teaching? Well, of course you do.
We all have a philosophy of teaching, and
we often don't express it that way and some people
are a little frightened if you said to a teacher,
"What's your philosophy?"
You know, they might shrink back a bit and
say, "Oh, I've never done philosophy. I don't know anything about philosophy."
But of course you do, of course you think about your
teaching, of course you reflect, of course you draw on theories,
sometimes we call it implicit theories, and sometimes they're quite
explicit that you read more and you think more, that you talk to your colleagues
more, and you develop your own way of being, your own way of thinking,
your own way of acting, and that is your philosophy.
>> It is complex, but we all do have a philosophy of teaching.
We may not be able to name it explicitly, but we all carry one.
And I suppose having a philosophy of
teaching for myself has been quite organic because it has changed as well.
What my philosophy
of teaching was many years ago to what it is
now is very different and that's gone through a process
of change as well. But even though in the course we used words like epistemology
and axiology, I guess we do need to ask, what is the knowledges that we
want our learners to know?
What are the values that we want our learners to have? And so, I think those
are useful questions to ask, the deeper questions - about what is education?
Why do you teach?
What do we want our learners to know?
>> You might ask your students, "What is your philosophy?
What's your philosophy of learning and teaching?"
An interesting item in the UK,
there are courses for five years olds on philosophy,
and of course, five year olds are fantastic philosophers.
My grandchild at the age of four,
he philosophises all the time about reality and life and why
we are and why we ask questions and the why why why why why questions?
So, philosophy for five years olds just draws on those why questions -
why, why, why?
- and it builds on that innate curiosity and questioning that
children have until we knock it out of them, of course.
>> I suppose, importantly as well, by asking those deeper questions it gets us
to reflect on what we do and to think more deeply on what we do.
>> Our final question this week for Dennis and John is, what
sort of advice do you have for students when they're developing a portfolio?