At each break throughout the school day the tables around the Main Building become a hive of activity and the excited buzz of chatter from Year 12 students. When passing by the tables you can hear the girls talking about weekend events, discussing assignments, or planning the next bake stall. Everything happens at the Year 12 tables, it is the hub of their final year. While they typify chatting teenage girls, a more significant observation about the tradition of the Year 12 tables is that the girls are sharing and supporting one another through the ups and downs of their final year at school. It is at the table that they find comfort and reassurance in each other’s company, reinforcing meaningful friendships.

Can the same be said for the family dinner table?

With the pressures of modern life, there is a renewed emphasis on the importance of sharing a meal together as a family. The structure of many households today is varied. Families can take the form of two parents, usually both working fulltime, or a single parent, where the demands of daily routine require clockwork precision. Within families the children may be heavily involved in co-curricular activities before and after school, are busy with school work or are preoccupied with the visually captivating world within the computer screen. With this in mind, finding the time to get everyone to come to the table at the same time and discuss the goings-on of the day can seem like a quaint throwback to a bygone era.

The history of sharing a meal with others can be traced back to ancient times. In the days of hunters and gathers great ceremony and ritual was placed on the meal that had been prepared, as men had often risked their life to bring food to the table. It was a time to acknowledge the importance of the community and being thankful for the food they had. Our own meal time traditions in contemporary Australia can be traced to more recent history, having its roots in industrial Europe and America. However, it too has changed and morphed over time due to social, economic and technological pressures as time marches on. With the development of convenience and fast foods the ritual in preparing a meal for loved ones and sharing it together seems to have been fallen by the way side. Nancy Gibb in The magic of the family meal highlights that anthropologists assert that the development of fast food has killed the ceremony of sharing meals. Gibb cites Professor Robin Fox, from Rutgers University in New Jersey who goes as far as to posit that “we have reduced eating to sitting alone and shovelling it in” (2006). This is certainly a grim take on modern meal times, but have they really become so pedestrian and mundane? Surely with the popularity of television shows such as Masterchef there are far more Aussie families planning and preparing meals together. Despite the history, research (Busch; Huntley; Macpherson) shows that the simple act of sitting down as a family to share a meal together teaches vital life skills.

In an Ipsos study conducted in 2008 by social researcher, Dr Rebecca Huntley called Because Family Mealtimes Matter, it stated that the number of Australian families sitting down and sharing a meal during any given week is declining. The nation-wide survey of 1000 Australians found that 59 per cent ate their weekday dinner together at the family table and of those respondents, 60 per cent stated they had the television on while eating (2008, p34). These statistics reflect the nature of twenty-first century life and the pressure it puts on the traditional social structures and functions of families. Interestingly, Huntley identified three key benefits of family mealtimes, these being improved relationships between family members, improved nutrition and eating habits with children, and improved social behaviour.

Family cohesion and security is crucial during the turbulent adolescent years. Sitting together at mealtimes allows family members to communicate with one another in a regular forum which builds family connectedness. When children feel connected to their parents they are more likely to turn to them when problems arise. Moreover, parents are more likely to know the names of their children’s friends, teachers and what is happening at school which leads to the child believing that their parents are interested and engaged in all aspects of their life. This is supported by Professor William Doherty, from the University of Minnesota and author of The Intentional Family: Simple Rituals to Strengthen Family Ties who speaks of the notion of “family citizenship” which entails the duty that each family member has to one another (1999). By actively engaging during mealtimes parents and children are exercising their responsibilities as part of the family. Everyone comes to know the important role they play, and this in turn helps build the family’s identity and culture.

As all parents of adolescents know, in an era of social media, this kind of connection is easier said than done. The majority of teenagers have a Facebook account where they may be seemingly connected to 250 friends all at the same time. This is not to mention the mobile phone, which is constantly on and severe bouts of separation anxiety would ensue should it be lost. With this in mind, it seems all the more crucial to draw teens away from these technological distractions to eat a meal together to reinforce the family unit. Miriam Weinstein, author of The Surprising Power of Family Meals says that “we’ve sold ourselves on the idea that teenagers are obviously sick of their families, that they’re bonded to their peer group. We’ve taken it to an extreme. We’ve taken it to mean that a teenager has no need for their family. And that’s just not true” (Gibbs, 2006). Thus, it can be concluded that the connection within the family unit that can be built during mealtimes is far more nurturing and sustainable in adolescent development.

Eating the family meal together on a regular basis has important nutritional benefits. In the Ipsos study, Huntley draws information from various American university surveys whereby families that were more likely to eat meals together every day “generally consumed higher amounts of important nutrients such as calcium, fibre, iron, vitamins B6 and B12, C and E and consumed less overall fat” (2008, p 16). These nutritional findings are worth noting as recently there has been much talk in Australia about the alarming increase in the rate of childhood obesity, with results from the 2007-08 National Health Survey indicating that 24.9 per cent of children aged 5 – 17 years are overweight or obese (Overweight and Obesity in Australia, 2010). Those families that eat frequently together saw the adolescents have a decreased risk of unhealthy weight control practices and substance abuse (Huntley, 2008, p17). It can also help safe guard against adolescents developing eating disorders.

Improved social behaviours can be developed through the habit of family meal time. Children learn how to ask questions, listen to others and solve problems by sitting and engaging around the dinner table. This socialisation process is fundamental in equipping young people with the skills to thoughtfully navigate their way through the world. The time old traditions of having good table manners is important to enforce, questions such as “may I please leave the table?” and “could you please pass the salt?” help teenagers understand the significance of being polite and come to value the routine of the family dinner. Discussions around the dinner table serve the purpose of modelling to teenagers how to overcome difficulties and solve issues that they will inevitably be challenged by.

The family dinner table is a great place for storytelling; place where the family can build upon its own rituals or as Nancy Gibb suggests, become the forum where “legends are passed down, jokes rendered, [and] eventually the wider world examined through the lens of a family’s values” (2006). For it is from this platform that a family’s values help guide children to understand how to listen to other people’s concerns and respect their opinions. In the Years 8 and 9 Ethics programmes at Brisbane Girls Grammar School the students are taught to communicate thoughtfully, read body language, develop friendships and understand the importance of empathy. While these skills are taught explicitly through structured lessons and implicitly within the classroom framework, if the values are evident at home the impact can be far more influential. The importance of the family mealtime as a place for imparting valuable social skills is also furthered by Huntley who highlights the civilising role eating a family meal has on teens in that they are more “socially adept, confident and less likely to engage in what is often called ‘anti-social behaviour’” (2008, p18). Consequently, the lessons taught around the family dinner table go much further than learning to keep your elbows off the table.

So, perhaps the time old tradition of sitting down to a communal meal with the family needs to be revisited or at least remember the importance. It’s a fact that we need to ensure that we have three healthy meals a day to nourish our bodies so that we are able to function but it also provides social and emotional nourishment in adolescent development. Like the hub of the Year 12 tables, the family table can become a focal point which naturally draws family members together to share and relish in each other’s stories, navigate the challenges and celebrate the victories. Now then —whose turn is it to set the table?

References:

Busch, Gillian (2011) The social orders of family mealtime. (PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology). Retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/48024/1/Gillian_Busch_Thesis.pdf

Department of Health and Ageing (2010). Overweight and Obesity in Australia. Retrieved from http://www.healthyactive.gov.au/internet/healthyactive/publishing.nsf/Content/overweight-obesity

Doherty, W. J., (1999). The Intentional Family: Simple Rituals to Strengthen Family Ties. Harper Collins; Sydney.

Gibb, N., (2006, June 4). The magic of the family meal. In Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760,00.html

Huntley, R., (2008). White Paper: Because Family Mealtimes Matter. Ipsos Australia. Retrieved from http://www.rebeccahuntley.com/pdf/white-paper.pdf

Macpherson, K., (2012, January 31). Mealtime is a moment best shared. The Courier Mail.

This week has seen the School celebrate the diversity of our community in Multicultural Week. At first glance, this has taken the form of students (and teachers) donning national dress, sharing internationally-flavoured foods, and partaking in music and dance. On a deeper level, though, it has provided us with the opportunity to reflect upon the importance of each individual’s contribution to our community. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ wrote Joan Didion in 1967. Even SBS television’s slogan ‘7 billion stories and counting …’ is recognition of the value of the narrative in our local, national and global communities. UNESCO (2001) notes that culture is at the heart of contemporary debates about identity and social cohesion and that the process of globalisation, facilitated by the rapid development of new information and communication technologies, creates the conditions for renewed dialogue among cultures and civilisations. In our particular biosphere of over 1,100 adolescents and the adults who care for them, how do we celebrate diversity and enable the development of identity, acknowledging that it is our individual differences, our journeys and our stories, which ultimately enrich and strengthen our community?

New technologies are the defining characteristic of our increasingly globalised contemporary era, impacting upon almost every aspect of our public and private lives. The rise of social media and virtual communities offer new opportunities for connecting with others around the globe and sharing stories. According to ABS statistics, seventy-nine per cent of Australian households have internet access. If you are a family with children under the age of 15 years, then that figure jumps to ninety-three per cent, which has increased from forty-six per cent in 2002. Sociologists and anthropologists warn us that when information is so easily distributed throughout the world, cultural meanings, values and tastes run the risk of becoming homogenised, diluted to the point where cultural heritage is dismissed or overlooked completely. In our school community, where we aspire to be creative, imaginative and wise, we reject the idea of uniformity, mindless clones that ‘fit in’ to a homogenised setting.

Throughout history, tribes, communities and nations have charged certain citizens with the responsibility for initiating their young into the patterns of behaviour and the crucial knowledge required if the neophytes are to become full, participating members of the community. Every human group has its own rites of passage, like moving to high school or changing schools, formally marking the progression from birth into full citizenship. Scientists have identified that when some climatic or geographical revolution occurs, upsetting the established balance of nature, not just one new species but a whole clade will appear. In biological terms, a clade is the opposite of a clone – essentially a group of organisms, such as a species, whose members share homologous features derived from a common ancestor. This is the outcome of an episode of rapid multiplication and diversifications of small populations expanding into a new and disturbed habitat. We can think of the move into high school, or changing schools throughout the course of secondary school as a ‘climatic or geographical revolution’, and the Girls Grammar environment as the ‘new and disturbed habitat’. Our challenge is whether to become a clone or to be part of a clade, and how to make our social institutions flexible enough to preserve our precious biological and cultural diversity. So what does this mean for an adolescent navigating this terrain?

Adolescents today are experiencing not one but two transitions – from childhood to adulthood, but also the transition of the nature of society. This current generation has been born into an era of unprecedented transition – from industrial to information-based culture and economy, from print-based to multimedia, digital approaches to communication (Bahr & Pendergast, 2007). Their social and cultural patterns are characterised by this significant paradigm shift. No longer are any of us constrained by enclosures such as time and distance – communication technologies are constantly developing and hybridising to form new and unexpected forms of media – and a simultaneous universe has been created.

The central task of adolescence is to achieve a sense of personal identity (Head, 1997) and schooling is one of the means whereby an individual cultivates his or her own unique set of skills, temperament, potentialities and physical attributes so that over time each will develop into her best self. The challenge is for one’s best self to emerge not as a ‘great reveal’ of pre-existing static personality characteristics, but as part of a developmental process where beliefs and mindsets are updated and modified by experience, and identity is ‘grown’. In other words, not the cloning of pre-existing or externally imposed notions of self, but the preservation of what is special, unique, and good. More than ever before, questions of identity plague our society, hence the growth in phenomena such as the mid-life crisis and now, the quarter-life crisis. Greenfield (2008, p.3) talks about a societal swing, where ‘identity shifts away from the unique person with their idiosyncratic personality in favour of the collective persona, the collective narrative’.

We recognise the collective narrative at Girls Grammar – our Grammar ‘tribe’ begins initiating Year 8 students even before they have finished primary school, clearly modelling patterns of behaviour and sharing knowledge. This is intended to be a process of story sharing, of welcoming new members to the community and recognising each individual’s strengths and abilities, not sublimating an individual’s voice in order to create uniformity. There is also a certain amount of socialisation that occurs here, where certain norms, values and beliefs are reinforced. Egan (2008) warns that socialisation today not only fits us to a particular social group but also identifies ‘us’ to ourselves as distinct from other groups. Creating and maintaining healthy, inclusive and productive communities is not about widening a chasm between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but increasing the range of people we include as ‘we’, widening our solidarity with others (Rorty, 1989). Maintaining personal integrity, developing empathy and a sense of self while fitting in to a new environment can be a considerable challenge.

In this process of transition into a new school environment, some have a smoother path than others, welcoming the opportunity and growth that adaptation brings and finding like-minded individuals almost immediately. For others, ‘getting it right’ in a new environment can be a very stressful process requiring additional support and encouragement. Friendships take longer to cultivate, and worry about managing workloads and new routines feels overwhelming for some time. This challenge is amplified when students join the ‘tribe’ after Year 9, for it is just that bit more difficult to differentiate between the clones and clades, and for a new student to understand the culture and find her place in the School while retaining her individual character and developing into her best self.

It is with this understanding of difference and individuality – in ourselves, in one another, and in the ideas with which we engage –that we bring our individual coloured threads to the loom of school life. These threads, over time, are interwoven, stretched and combined to create a unique and vibrant tapestry. 137 years of stories … and counting …

References 

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2001). Household Use of Information Technology, Australia, 2010-11. Retrived May 7, 2012, from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/8146.02010-11?OpenDocument 

Bahr, N. and Pendergast, D. (2007). The Millennial Adolescent. Camberwell: Acer Press.

Egan, K. (2008). The future of education: reimagining our schools from the ground up. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Greenfield, S. (2008). i.d. The Quest for Identity in the 21st century. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Head, J. (1997). Working with Adolescents: Constructing Identity. London: Falmer Press.

Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UNESCO. (2001). Universal Declaration on Cultural Identity. Retrieved April 24, 2012, from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001271/127160m.pdf

Professor Erica McWilliam, Brisbane Girls Grammar School’s Author in Residence 2012, and Professor Peter Taylor

For some time now it has been obvious that middle class kids are becoming more vulnerable. This is so despite the fact that they may be living in nice homes with supportive parents and attending well resourced schools and having comforts that their Third World counterparts can only dream of. They are vulnerable because learning is not personally significant to them. Kids who learn to avoid the discomfort of unfamiliar ideas, who do not welcome the instructive complications of error, who think learning is a boring necessity because it is basically about preparing for tests, who are reliant on parents and teachers to tell them what to do, or to do it for them, who expect university degrees to be passports to employability and financial security – such kids are now in real trouble.

We are not suggesting that there is any intention on the part of the caring adults in their lives to do kids out of a rich and rewarding future – indeed, the contrary is much more likely to be true. The problem is that global transformations have made a nonsense of the scripts we still invest in to prepare young people for their living, learning and earning futures. There is no point in preparing them for a twentieth century future by relying on the rules for social advancement that worked for us back then. Put bluntly, it is not just unhelpful – it is downright dangerous.

The Ten Propositions we set out below are intended to help us all unlearn what counts as the best educational experience we can provide for our kids and their teachers, and work towards more relevant schooling.

Proposition 1: The future isn’t what it used to be

It is not so long ago that we thought the future would be about a much higher visibility for Big Technology – that, in a world congested with machines, we would be wearing metallic spacesuits and being served by humanoid robots with metallic voices. This was before the advent of the internet and its affordances for living, learning and earning. Now, in this second decade of a new century, we are coming to understand that the key marker of new times is the way in which the data we use to live, learn and earn is being transformed.

Data transformation, in turn, is making for massive cultural transformations. Both Facebook and Twitter are technologies that have transformed who we connect with, where and how. According to IBM’s Norbert Ender, speaker at the recent ZISInnovate ThinkTank[i], we are seeing vast changes to our world as a result of the 15 peta-bytes[ii] of information per day being generated in and through online data systems. For instance, with more people on Facebook now than living on earth at turn of twentieth century, and with over two billion people now connected by the web, we have unprecedented ways of connecting and engaging with each other, with work, with government and with organisational systems. Commercial operations whose business once relied on vertical hierarchies of management and vertical supply and demand chains have been transformed into horizontal networks in which the flow of data is unprecedented and in which any node that does not add value can and will be by-passed. Digital tools are affordances that baby boomers have adapted to, but young people take them for granted – not technologies, just living. So it is no miracle, for our young people, that it is now possible to search 100 billion pages in fifteen seconds – indeed, they are increasing frustrated by what they perceive as delay or slowness of access or delivery.

Yet the digital revolution is just beginning. If, as futurist Ray Kurzweil argues, ‘the Singularity is near’[iii], then the current capacities of computers will soon allow computing intelligence to become more pervasive, merging with human consciousness to change our very ontology as human beings. And all of this at a time when global crises of one sort or another – environmental, financial, social, moral and ethical – threaten the planet’s very survival.

Those young people who grew up with the web as a constant in their lives – the digital natives – are no longer future managers – they are already in the workforce and in management in large numbers, challenging a more techno-fearful generation of baby boomer managers who have had to adapt to unique cultural transformations in the home and the workplace. Like their peers elsewhere, the under thirty-five year olds have arrived with the understanding that being lied to is a constant condition of their lives. Every automated message that tells them ‘your call is important to us’, every bit of spam promising massive lottery wins or inherited millions, every packaged deal of ‘unbeatable’ offers, adds to their mistrust of all but perhaps a handful of their closest peers.

The disposition to mistrust can be a useful one, as all good scientists know, as long as it can be harnessed as scepticism rather than hardening into cynicism. The world-weary ‘whatever’ shoulder shrug, satirised so often as typical of our kids’ response to the pushes and pulls they experience in their lives, may well be symptomatic of the latter. So those who promise to prepare young people to meet the unparalleled challenges they face in the future – and most schools make just that promise in their glossy brochures and mission statements – really have their work cut out to deliver on that promise.

Proposition 2: We cannot teach kids what they need to know

This is so because of the way data itself, and the way we engage with it, is being transformed. As digital guru Moshe Rappoport explains[iv], the four ‘V’s: the Volume, Variety, Velocity and Veracity of online data make it impossible for educators to create a knowledge base that will prepare young people for their post-schooling life. Volume matters because the current rate of data generation will continue to grow exponentially. Variety will matter, because, of the two broad types of data we currently engage with, Data at Rest and Data in Motion, the latter is exploding as more smart objects are developed (e.g. storage spaces that make business decisions) and as computers become better at deep analytics (e.g. for the first time, the Jeopardy game is better done by a machine than a person – computers are starting to get nuance). The Velocity or speed at which data moves is also growing exponentially; it is predicted to be 10,000 times faster than today if it is to meet the needs of entrepreneurial businesses in the next decade. In other words, the speed of light is now too slow.

With so much data being generated so fast and for so many purposes, how to make decisions about whether and how to trust data, will be a key factor in whether and how young people can live optimally in their future world. If at least eighty per cent of data is likely, as Rappoport claims, to be misleading or unreliable, (e.g. ‘averages’, or aggregates are often ‘true’ but misleading), then the capacity to judge data Veracity will need constantly to be the subject of updating, unlearning and re-learning.

It follows that asking kids to spend a great deal of their time memorising bits of data (for example, those needed to perform well on standardised pencil and paper tests of static disciplinary knowledge), becomes a ludicrously dated activity in the context of this data explosion. This does not mean that there should be no curriculum content in programs of learning in schools and universities, but it does mean that the ‘coverage’ culture of the twentieth century classroom – the idea that we can and should educate young people by asking them to remember lots of discipline-bound ‘stuff’ – is a side issue when it comes to building capacity to thrive in a very different world of knowledge production.

Proposition 3. Learning matters more than knowing

The cultural transformations that are being produced by the online data explosion are a sign that the bottom has fallen out of the predictable social world for which we educate. Put another way, capacity and competence cannot be extrapolated from success in discipline-based exams or the ability to imitate low level knowledge transactions. The best we can do is to ensure that our young people develop a high functioning disposition to learn and to make smart choices about what, how, where and when they learn. This disposition would be evident in their relentless curiosity, their agility with a wide variety of knowledge systems, and their ability to unlearn, to put scepticism to work in their own interests and the interests of others. And all this without having their hand held by teachers or parents.

When their learning matters more than their knowing, then young people get to practise what Charlie Leadbeater calls useful ignorance[v]. It is our knowledge, he insists, that prevents us from taking risks, not our ignorance. This is as true for teachers and parents as it is for kids. When we are sure that we ‘know’ what effective teaching or parenting is, we are less likely to move away from these certainties, to take risks or experiment in ways that appear to deviate from what we know to be true.

In schools, we generally mandate content, ‘cover’ it, and test it as fixed and immutable knowledge. Meanwhile, the speed at which new knowledge can be acquired and the speed with which that knowledge is being displaced is increasing at an exponential rate. This is true not only in the professions, but at all levels of economic and social life. According to the Tough Choices or Tough Times Report of the US National Center on Education and Economy:

Line workers who cannot contribute to the design of the products they are fabricating may be as obsolete as the last model of that product … auto mechanics will have to figure out what to do when many of the computers in the cars they are working on do not function as they were designed to function…, software engineers who are also musicians and artists will have an edge over those who are not as the entertainment industry evolves …[and] it will pay architects to know something about nanotechnology and small business people who build custom yachts and fishing boats will be able to survive only if they quickly learn a lot about the scientific foundations of carbon fiber composites[vi].

In this scenario, the capacity to learn, unlearn and re-learn fast will beat knowing every time.

Proposition 4. To choose to learn means choosing the discomfort of the unfamiliar and the not yet

Lifelong learning, like ageing, is not for sissies. Those young people who have been given to understand that comfort, security, and easy success are their birthright, who are used to doing low level clerical work in low challenge classrooms, will find that the confusions and complications of actual learning to be a real eye-opener. No-one can blame our kids for expecting to be affirmed for their efforts, no matter how insignificant, or their opinions, no matter how uninformed, given the therapeutic idiom of schooling in recent times. What will count for future living learning and earning, however, is the ability to stay in the grey of not knowing and not yet, to tolerate the discomfort of unfamiliar concepts, to imagine strategies for engaging multifarious methods to generate new ways of thinking and doing. Kids who have only known comfort are unlikely to choose to move away from it.

There are, however, some lessons we can learn from history about the importance of tolerating discomfort. One of the great strengths demonstrated by those Chinese who left their homeland in the nineteenth century to seek and find prosperity in very distant and different parts of the world was their ability to ‘sleep anywhere and eat anything’, to tolerate short-term discomforts in the pursuit of long-term reward. This is not, in general, a disposition that we have encouraged in our young people. Instead, we are more likely to see teachers disseminating worksheets that ask little in terms of creative thinking, and parents taking over homework tasks or worrying about any task set for their child that might initially be confusing or complex.

Put simply, if our young people are to take their rightful place as active and ethical participants in this fast-changing world, they need more than low level clerical skills, or even traditional disciplinary knowledge and high levels of literacy and numeracy. They need a broad set of creative capabilities that heighten their ability to select, shuffle, re-combine, or synthesise existing facts, ideas, faculties and skills in original ways. Most important among these capacities is a disposition to welcome the instructive complications of error-making, rather than simply ‘playing safe’ through passive imitation and memorisation.

Proposition 5. Schooling needs to provide kids with low threat, high challenge experiences

Educators learned some time ago that all kids learn best when they feel supported, not made to feel inferior or restricted or afraid. So it is not a matter of going back to a time when schooling meant sitting silently with hands behind backs in individual desks in rows, nor to the sort of punitive culture that measured each child’s worth in terms of their latest test result. The way forward for schools is to maintain the high level of learning support we now know to be appropriate, but to increase our expectations of kids in terms of risk-taking and innovativeness. This means, among other things, designing tasks that allow kids to ask better questions, not just give correct answers. It also means that high praise is not easily or quickly won, because complex task design militates against instant or easy success. Support is high, but so too are expectations and challenges. In his manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams, writer Seth Godin argues that the lowering of expectations in relation to high-powered learning that maps on to real living is tantamount to stealing from kids the opportunities they might otherwise have had to know confusion and come out the other end. He says:

The puzzles of math and physics are among the most perfect in the world. They are golden opportunities to start young adults down the path of lifelong learning. The act of actually figuring something out, of taking responsibility for finding an answer and then proving that you are right—this is at the heart of what it means to be educated in a technical society. But we don’t do that any longer. There’s no time and there’s no support. Parents don’t ask their kids, ‘What did you figure out today?’ They don’t wonder about which frustrating problem is no longer frustrating. No, parents have been sold on the notion that a two-digit number on a progress report is the goal—if it begins with a ’9′[vii].

If low threat, high challenge teaching is confronting for parents who are test-driven, it is also confronting for those teachers convinced that challenge new technologies are making young people too distractible to learn in any sustained and meaningful way. Distractibility is not, however, a mental illness – it can and should be harnessed for learning by ensuring that learning intentions remain clear. This is the same logic used by a writer who jumps to the thesaurus or checks a reference or a statistic or investigates a new angle or simply stops and stares out of a window. While it is highly likely that today’s young people will be turned off by lectures and long-windedness on the part of their teachers or parents, it is not enough that they are simply kept busy doing low-level tasks to stop them from being distracted. More than ever, the learning intention of a task or activity needs to be clearly articulated and ‘owned’ by all who are engaged in it. In an ecology of constant interruption such as the Web world, the teacher who is most effective in helping kids learn to learn is the one who works at the intersection of intentionality and distractibility.

Proposition 6. Teachers have new responsibilities as co-learners in this scenario

If teachers are to build the skills needed to work at the intersection of intentionality and distractibility, then they will have to unlearn many of the mental models that frame what counts as good teaching. Most baby boomers know that the ability to a teacher to ensure ‘every eye on me’ was the hallmark of the effective post-war teacher, the Sage on the Stage. The teacher’s job was to instruct, inspire, scold, cajole. A ‘pupil’s’ job was to listen, attend, absorb, regurgitate. The predominance of that style of teaching is supposed to have been overturned, and in many schools it has. Child-centered education has for some time now been the high ground of pedagogical work, and a great deal more attention has been paid, in turn, to the needs of kids as individuals with differing backgrounds, interests and learning preferences. The focus on the uniqueness of the child rather than the personality of the teacher changed what counted as effective teaching. Programmes of teacher education shifted to ‘the child-as-learner’ and to teachers as ‘facilitators of learning’. For the professional teacher, this meant a shift from ‘Sage on the Stage’ to ‘Guide on the Side’.

The unprecedented cultural transformations outlined briefly above pre-empt an end to this era because of its propensity to lower the bar on challenge as well as threat.  The speed and complexity of transactions in life, in business and in learning demand a new era of learning engagement in which teachers see themselves as Meddlers in the Middle, co-learning with kids, modelling how to take risks, do experiments, and how to be resilient when those experiments don’t come off.

Medding-in-the-middle challenges the Sage on the Stage and the Guide on the Side in a number of ways. Specifically, it means less time standing out front giving instructions and more time spent being a usefully ignorant team member in the thick of the action, less time spent testing for correct answers and more time spent on giving kids opportunities to ask better questions, less time spent being a custodial risk minimiser and more time spent being an experimenter, risk-taker and learner, less time spent being a forensic classroom auditor and more time spent being a designer, editor and assembler, less time spent being a counsellor and ‘best buddy’ and more time spent being a collaborative critic and authentic evaluator.

As Meddlers in the Middle, teachers focus on how students get to experience learning as personally significant. That is, they make thoughtful decisions about whether the kids they teach need a deep, prolonged engagement or a ‘just in time, just enough and just down the hall’ experience. They ensure that diagnostic learning strategies augment student performance strategies, in order to build their students’ capacity to self-manage. To do so, they devise and use new pedagogical routines, habits, norms, and they are proactive in using digital tools for self-selected learning purposes. Finally, they expect to be constantly updating and improving their pedagogical strategies, seeking out and evaluating formal and informal feedback from their students and their colleagues to do so.

Proposition 7. The challenge for teachers is to re-professionalise, not de-professionalise

Teachers have for some time now been expected to be learners too, but the tools their employers have used for this purpose have generally proven to be very blunt indeed.  In the last two decades, while so much has been happening to open up learning, much has been shut down in the name of cost-cutting and efficiency. We have seen in most western countries the unprecedented intrusion of national agendas into educational policy settings, as governments cut expenditure particularly in the high budget areas of education and health.  These intrusions have been accompanied by new initiatives to establish ‘professional standards’ of teaching and to set up bodies to oversee implementation and accountability in terms of those standards. In turn, professional teacher standards have turned a forensic spotlight on ‘teacher improvement’, evidenced by narrow, measurable indicators such as improved standardised test scores and higher school retention rates.

The implications of these centralising tendencies for teacher professionalism and learning are clear.  Teacher professionalism has been diminished. System-level agendas have moved decision-making to the centre, with schools seen merely as sites of implementation, not cultures of learning. As a result, teacher learning has become standardised, driven by those same agendas, and supported through centralised provision of resources and templates for teachers’ professional development. It is not as though there is nothing of worth in the generic models of professional development rolled out from central office. However, it is clear that packaged PD is not well received by many if not most teachers, nor is it regarded as responsive to local conditions. This latter point can be used as an excuse for changing nothing at all.

Personally significant learning is better served by significant ‘local’ adaptation of central initiatives, whether the learner is a teacher or a student.  If Helen Timperley, an academic with long experience of teachers’ professional learning, is correct when she argues that “adaptive expertise has professional learning at its core”[viii], then site-specific initiatives for adapting teacher practice to the changing local conditions are more valuable as strategies for teacher improvement than generic templates designed to serve everyone and no-one, everywhere and no-where.

When professional learning builds adaptive expertise at the local level, then there is the real possibility of re-professionalising teaching in ways that can complement central frameworks and standards. This requires school leaders to exercise deliberate initiative in facilitating adaptation, through supporting teachers to become more confident and competent professional decision-makers. It also promises a broader learning agenda than implied by calls for greater disciplinary expertise, most often aligned with the ‘coverage’ culture and mandated knowledge.  Re-professionalising means that attention can be given to the learning experiences associated with critical and creative thinking, ethical behaviour, personal and social competence, and the intercultural understandings that are also flagged in the educational policies of progressive nations.

Proposition 8. Teacher improvement is more valuable if it is site-specific rather than template-driven

Re-professionisation and adaptive expertise imply that professional learning is a personal responsibility. They also imply a level of rigour and accountability that moves beyond self-indulgent versions of professional reflection and ‘action research’ towards a collaborative, networked and peer-referenced intellectual environment.  In a context where there is often more diversity within a school than between schools, consideration of the ways to mine the anthill of diverse site-based practice is a valuable starting point for professional learning, especially in larger schools.

How might this be done?  We know that professional learning is optimised where conversation is used as the basis for the negotiation of meanings and intentions, and where those conversations address issues of the ‘why’, the ‘what’ and  the ‘how’ of teaching, with the ‘how’ understood in terms of strategies and routines. Site-specific conversations allow for sharing and borrowing of those strategies and routines between peers.  Sharing and borrowing in smart ways, in turn, allows everyone in a school community to recognise and value the professional expertise that is on-site.  So annotated video-based excerpts, for example, are a very valuable means of sharing – making the pedagogical reasoning behind those practices visible.

It is self-evident that such smart borrowing and smart sharing are likely to be most effective done in contexts of high trust, contexts where the overall goal of teacher learning is improvement through adaptation, rather than compliance and mindless imitation. In such contexts, smart borrowing and smart sharing affords a low-stakes and cost-effective approach to the provision of resources for professional learning.

For too long teachers have worked like Gulliver among their little people. It is time to usher in a post-Gulliver era in which it is normal for teams of teachers to engage with teams of students, where lock-step grades and locked-in classrooms give way to a constant flow of people and ideas within and around the learning communities, physical and online, that make up a school. This flow of people and ideas stands to be greatly enhanced by a re-professionalising agenda in which teachers learn to be smart borrowers from the best of what is going on alongside them. Conversely, it stands to be diminished if and when teachers only look for their salvation to the next all-purpose template or curriculum package from ‘head office’ to land in their collective lap.

Proposition 9. Kids who experience the pleasure of the rigour of learning will always choose to learn

It goes without saying that we are more likely to engage in activities we enjoy, whether they are activities associated with professional learning or learning of any other sort. It follows that we would want young people to find pleasure in the work they do in schools. For some time efforts have been made in progressive classrooms to ensure that our kids come to experience learning as a pleasant thing to do. The imperative to have fun with Maths, or Science or reading has transformed many classrooms from dreary institutionalised settings into colour-filled spaces whose aesthetic is designed to appeal to our kids’ sense of fun and enjoyment.

What is less obvious, however, is compelling evidence that the pleasure of learning in such an environment is equally derived from frequent engagement in rigorous complex problem-posing and problem-solving. Having fun with sums is not the equivalent of the pleasure of relating empirical data to complex formulae and equations, or to innovative models and metaphors. The ability to see the part in the context of a wider and more complex whole, to intuitively or analytically experiment with ideas and their products, to bring function and aesthetics together in value-adding ways, to collaborate in a dynamic team for the purposes of increasing opportunities for successful innovation – all these are the attributes of highly employable young people who know the rewards and deep satisfactions that come from seeking out complex cognitive challenges. In other words, they know the pleasure of serious play. In his book The Play Ethic, author Pat Kane insists that “play will be to the 21^st century what work was to 300 years of industrial society – our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value”[ix]. When young people experience serious play as a normal way to approach their learning, they are likely to maintain their desire to engage the unfamiliar with a sense of keen anticipation, not dread.

Proposition 10. Self-managers with powerful learning portfolios trump those who rely solely on credentials

Once young people taste the pleasure of the rigour of serious play and high challenge learning, they are no longer bound by the conventions of the ‘coverage’ culture, or the sense that the only thing that matters is their next set of test results. In other words, learning becomes personally significant to them.  Secondary students who presented at the 2012 Innovate ZISThinkTank made it clear that, while they valued their schooling and the quality of teaching they received from most of their teachers, their eyes were on a prize far greater than an ‘A’ grade. Some of the highest flyers were seriously considering by-passing university courses, even those as prestigious as Stanford and MIT, into which they had been accepted, because their self-selected learning was so compelling and their self-management of it so sophisticated. They just could not see the point of sitting in lectures or taking three years to complete a degree. They were both capable and impatient.

There are powerful implications here for the future of formal education, implications that schools and universities may not want to hear, much less respond to.  Universities will have to adapt or become obsolete, just as baby boomer managers have been forced to adapt to the new imperatives of a world in which high-powered learning is possible within networks that have nothing to do with educational institutions. It should not surprise us that a number of our brightest and best kids are starting to choose fast-track learning over slow-track degrees. Unfortunately, it is also unsurprising that kids who have been spoon-fed, who have never learned to self-manage, who have been compliant and comfortable, will find themselves pawns in a very fast-paced, high challenge employability game. It is the players – those for whom learning is personally significant and opportunities are created, not found – who will reap the rewards.

(The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the organisers of the ZIS Innovate ThinkTank ‘Learning 2030: Schools Out?’ held in Zurich on March 15-17 2012, for its contribution to the ideas in this paper.)

Mrs Anne Ingram, Dean of Students

It was a pleasure to welcome back to the School this week visiting cyber safety expert, Ms Susan McLean, to address students in Years 10, 11 and 12. Our first experience with Ms McLean was in 2011 and the students were looking forward to hearing from her again. Acknowledged as Australia’s foremost expert in the area of youth cyber safety, Ms McLean’s career spans twenty-seven years of distinguished service in the Victoria Police, with much of this time dedicated to working in undercover operations to expose online offenders. Students, parents and staff alike gained much from Ms McLean’s presentations this week. She is an engaging and, at times, hard-hitting speaker, able to draw on a wealth of real-life experiences and examples that make her deliveries so captivating and compelling.

With the explosion of cyber technology, the issues of cyber bullying and ‘sexting’ have emerged as key concerns confronting the safety and well-being of young people. 3G mobile phones, instant messaging, online games and social networking sites ensure that today’s youth are always ‘on’. Their ‘plugged-in’ lives give them access to, and they are accessible by, many millions of people worldwide. Ms McLean’s message to the students this week was abundantly clear. The enjoyment and entertainment that cyberspace provides needs to be counterbalanced with a degree of caution as we navigate our digital way. Information on the web is not always reliable. The need to ‘think before you click’ is vital. Our digital footprints can be accessed at any time, and now, more than ever, the need to protect our digital reputations is paramount.

Sherry Turkle, psychologist and author of the book Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other (2011) voices her concerns regarding our reliance on all things digital and our movement away from human connection. She is of the opinion that technology is altering how people relate to one another and how they are constructing their own inner lives.

Ninety-five per cent of young people are online every day and ninety per cent of 12 to 17 year olds use social media (Botsman, 2012). These ‘screenagers’ see no differentiation between their online and offline lives. Technology has become an extension of their social selves, ‘promising to let them do anything, from anywhere with anyone’ (Turkle, 2011). A savvy and insightful intellectual, Turkle has pondered this topic for fifteen years and remains deeply concerned about the psychological side effects of internet use. It is her belief that the digital connections we make offer to us the illusion of company but without the demands of real friendship and she proposes that, despite our countless digital friends, today’s online avenues of communication could in fact be contributing to social isolation.

‘Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we conduct ‘risk free’ affairs on Second Life and confuse the scattershot postings on a Facebook wall with authentic communication’ (Turkle, 2011).

Turkle claims that technology ‘makes it easy to communicate when we wish to and to disengage at will’ (2011). The volume and pace of our lives can be overwhelming and we have turned to technology in an attempt to find time. It is easier and more time efficient to befriend strangers on Facebook instead of cultivating real friendships. Texting and tweeting have taken the place of talking on the phone or face-to-face. In fact, adolescents now avoid phone conversations if at all possible, citing the fact that ‘they take too long’, ‘are prying’ or ‘too much might show’. Texting and tweeting instead prioritise control and convenience and the protective ability to keep feelings at a distance. Turkle describes this as the modern-day Goldilocks concept. We seek just the right amount of access and control. We do not want people too close, or too far away but just at the right distance. How interesting that while we are so digitally tethered together, we are coming to expect less and less from human encounters.

Turkle believes that our ‘fantasies of substitution’ have cost us. We need time to talk and listen to each other, to return to the human connection that has for so long nourished and sustained us. Her plea is for technology to be put in its place and for us to learn how it can best be used to lead us back to our own selves, our own lives and our communities.

In stark contrast, Rachel Botsman, social innovator and author of the book What’s mine is yours: the rise of collaborative consumption (2010), challenges the ideas of Turkle. Botsman suggests in very powerful ways that social networking presents optimism and hope as the new ‘glue’ for modern communities. She speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through networking technologies and the move from a ‘me’ focus of hyper consumption to a ‘we’ focus of collaborative consumption.

Collaborative consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting that is being re-invented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces. The libraries and laundrettes of old are being replaced by a new age of sharing and collaborating at a scale that has never before been possible. Technology is increasingly empowering us to take advantage of our time, skills and assets and, at the same time, promote a strengthening of our communities. Botsman cites four key drivers that she believes are responsible for fusing together and creating the big shift away from hyper consumption and towards a twenty-first century defined by collaborative consumption. These drivers include: a renewed belief in the importance of community; a torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies that are changing the way we behave; pressing unresolved environmental concerns; and a global recession that has shocked consumer behaviours (Botsman, 2010). It would seem that as a society, we are at an inflection point where technological systems are enabling sharing behaviours. Redistribution markets like Swaptree stretch the lifecycle of a product and reduce waste. Collaborative lifestyles like Landshare and Airbnb are seeing people share everything from beach huts to garden space, and produce service systems like Zipcar and Goget provide the benefit of use of a product with a high ‘idling rate’ without ownership. According to Botsman, today’s society values access over ownership and ‘technology makes sharing frictionless and fun’ (2010).

Collaborative consumption involves tuning-in to our primate instincts of being born to share and co-operate. It involves matching people in two-way relationships that support the idea of community and create connection and belonging. It involves a paradigm shift from a ‘me-centred’ existence to being more ‘we-centred’, aptly described by Botsman as ‘getting to know the Joneses rather than keeping up with them’ (2010). All of these systems require a degree of trust and pivotal to their success is digital reputation. Within the web, we leave a trail that will indicate to others how well we can collaborate and whether we are able to be trusted. What will matter in this new era will be our digital reputations. The more we collaborate online in a positive manner, the more we foster a status of trustworthiness and build our reputation capital, the new social currency that will determine our access to collaborative consumption.

Despite Turkle’s concerns for humanity and its obsession with technology, it is exciting and enlightening to envisage how it can be used in such positive ways to establish social connections, build trust, foster a sense of community through sharing and, at the same time, nurture the planet. It would seem that instead of moving inwards on ourselves, technology presents to us the avenue for building strong reputation capital that is the key to leading us towards a brighter, richer, more collaborative future.

References

Botsman, R. (2012, April 2). Generation ‘we’: a new era of trust. Paper presented at the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia Pastoral Care Conference, Queensland.

Botsman, R. (2010, May 31). The case for collaborative consumption. Retrieved April 14, 2012 from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption.html

McLean, S. (2012, April 24). Keeping safe in cyberspace: what technology alone fails to teach you but what you really need to know. Presentation to Brisbane Girls Grammar School, Queensland.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.

Turkle, S. (2012, February). Connected, but alone? Retrieved April 13, 2012 from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

Brisbane Girls Grammar School’s Visiting Philosopher for 2012 is Associate Professor John Armstrong. Professor Armstrong is a Senior Advisor in the Office of the Vice Chancellor at the University of Melbourne and has been Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School. Educated at Oxford and London, he moved to Australia in 2001.

His primary interest is in the quality of relationships to ideas, people and objects—and the significance of such relationships for individual and collective flourishing1. Professor Armstrong has published a number of books including The Secret Power of Beauty (2006) and In Search of Civilisation (2009). Girls Grammar is extremely fortunate to have someone of Professor Armstrong’s calibre working with the School this year.

“At Brisbane Girls Grammar School I am hugely conscious of speaking with people who are working and living with reality—not with a pure philosophical investigation,” Professor Armstrong said, “And that is what is important and humbling”.

In Term I, Professor Armstrong spent some time in the School meeting with various staff and Faculties to gain an understanding of what underpins the School’s strategic aspiration to be a leader in exceptional scholarship and the rich teaching and learning environment embedded in the culture of Girls Grammar. He gave an inspiring address to staff in the first week of Term II that responded to these conversations.

“The risk of leadership is that it does not wait for consensus,” he said, “Leadership stakes its life on a view of where the good goals are and what the good ambitions are and seeks to bring other people on board. This is a vast discussion, it is only getting started”.

To read Professor Armstrong’s reflections on his work in the School so far and his emerging ideas on leadership, please click here.

April 2012

1: http://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/episode/53-growing-spiritual-prosperity

Brisbane Girls Grammar School’s Visiting Philosopher for 2012 is Associate Professor John Armstrong. Professor Armstrong is a Senior Advisor in the Office of the Vice Chancellor at the University of Melbourne and has been Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School. Educated at Oxford and London, he moved to Australia in 2001.

His primary interest is in the quality of relationships to ideas, people and objects—and the significance of such relationships for individual and collective flourishing1. Professor Armstrong has published a number of books including The Secret Power of Beauty (2006) and In Search of Civilisation (2009). Girls Grammar is extremely fortunate to have someone of Professor Armstrong’s calibre working with the School this year.

In Term I, Professor Armstrong spent some time in the School meeting with various staff and Faculties to gain an understanding of what underpins the School’s strategic aspiration to be a leader in exceptional scholarship and the rich teaching and learning environment embedded in the culture of Girls Grammar. He gave an inspiring address to staff in the first week of Term II that responded to these conversations. To follow is Professor Armstrong’s reflections on his work in the School so far and his emerging ideas on leadership. 

It’s been fascinating—and at times a bit confronting—to enter into the complex, on-going life of a great school and to join its internal discussion about values.

Serious conversations always have an after-life in our heads. We keep on debating with ourselves. One instance from many: we were talking in one of the groups about scholarship and what this grand term really means. One person suggested ‘the love of learning.’ It’s such an honourable and insightful way of defining scholarship that I stopped in my tracks. Only later did I realise that this isn’t the way a conversation ends—with a clinching, closing line. In fact, it is how conversations begin. For I should have asked: ‘what do you mean by love?’ and ‘what, really, is learning?’ This is why good conversations don’t finish quickly. They need to be taken up again—but taken up further along the track of understanding.

My sense of the guiding principle of what I’m trying to do is this: I think that we start out with important ideas in our heads but that we don’t fully see quite what these ideas are. We know we are onto something but when we say: what exactly am I getting at, it gets tricky. Yet that is just where we should be pushing ourselves. We want to do justice to our important intuitions by understanding them better—more accurately.

And that’s what I was trying to do with the idea of leadership in my talk. Leadership, it seems to me, is the surface name for something very important indeed. But the surface name doesn’t show us what that really important thing actually is. Ironically, we are often tempted to run away (mentally speaking) just as we approach the hard but valuable part.

So the task of thinking is that of homing-in on what we really care about. And that’s why the comment about ‘love of learning’ has come back to me so insistently. For the model of thinking that I’ve been discussing is—in fact—derived from one of the great accounts of love. Developed by Plato, who I talked about a bit on Monday morning.

Plato’s idea is that when we love we are attracted in a general way to someone or something. But the key question is: what is it about this person or thing that I love? Love is a search for the good that we imperfectly recognise in this person or thing. But thinking should be the same kind of search: what it is I love in this idea? What is the more accurate statement of the good that I imperfectly recognise in this idea? This sets us off on a process of discovery—and the best conversations have just this character.

At Brisbane Girls Grammar School I am hugely conscious of speaking with people who are working and living with reality—not with a pure philosophical investigation. And that’s what’s important and a bit humbling.

For it would be a terrible thing to think merely in the abstract and merely on paper (as it were). The whole point is to join up our grand mental adventures with real experience of doing things in the world—under all the pressures and with all the imperfections.

I want to make lofty talk feel more normal and natural. I want it to be useful to us. And one worry we have is that if you speak about grand things—if you speak about love, and Plato and beauty and values, you are going to sound a pit pretentious. Which means it sounds as if you have forgotten what life is like. Or, to put it another way, that you have somehow climbed out of the human condition. I’m acutely aware of my own shortcomings. I don’t say these things to you because I feel I have solved the riddle of existence. Rather, it is because I feel very intently the need to search for the best parts of myself (just because they are not strong enough, not secure enough).

A presiding impulse of civilization and civilized life is to join together material competence (efficiency, responsibility for the bottom line, competitive advantage, practical know-how) with ‘spiritual’ aspiration (lofty talk, love, beauty, honour, wisdom). These tasks generally feel as if they are in conflict. Yet we know that really they can and should help one another.

So, we are at the front line. It’s not that the great work is being done elsewhere, in academic papers which everyone will hear about in twenty years’ time. The great work can’t be there, because the great work can only be done now when you link up the lofty talk with the day-to-day workings of reality. That’s where we are.

In the staff groups we talked quite a bit about integrity and at times struggled to do justice to this powerful word. What is integrity, really? Why do we love this notion? Why do we aim at it—that is to say, why do we feel that it is under threat?

I’ve been mulling it over. And I wonder if the active issue around integrity is to do with feeling that your best self (the best version of yourself) is powerful. This is a huge challenge if we raise the bar and are ambitious (or have fine aspirations) for what this best self is like. The higher the bar, the harder it is to reach that level.

To finish by returning to the core topic of leadership. I was arguing that leadership has a crucial aspect of ‘direction giving’. And it involves setting the direction: where are we trying to go—and why there? ‘Direction’ is a way of talking about goals, ends, aspiration (what am I trying to become, as a kind of person) or ambition (what am I trying to achieve).

And the point is that these all have what might be called ‘ethical’ aspects. We want good goals, good, aspirations, good ambitions. ‘Good’ makes a lot of people tremble with uncertainty. But it is exactly the issue we have to address: the great question intimately and publicly for our times: what do I mean by ‘good’, what do we mean by ‘good’?

The risk of leadership is that it does not wait for consensus. Leadership stakes its life on a view of where the good goals are and what the good ambitions are and seeks to bring other people on board.

This is a vast discussion, it is only getting started.

April 2012

1: http://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/episode/53-growing-spiritual-prosperity

Mr Alan Dale

On a memorial tablet in a church in country NSW:

In proud and loving memory of
Cpl James Phillip Henderson
Only son of Robert and Caroline Henderson
Killed in action at Ypres 16 March 1916
Aged 22 years

He, being dead, yet speaketh

On a plaque at Brisbane Girls Gammar School:

This Garden
Was established by the Fathers Group
As a memorial to those staff and students
Who lost their lives in an accident at Christmas Creek
On 21 April, 1979

Helen Gahn, Jillian Skaines, John Stamford, Janelle Stamford (Nee Wherry)

We give thanks for the courage and selflessness shown by all those who survived

On a tombstone in a churchyard in Birmingham, the words from St John’s gospel:

I am the resurrection and the life, says the Lord.  He who believeth in me though he were dead yet shall he live and he who liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

I am sure we have all passed by hundreds of memorials like this, often with barely a glance let alone a thought as to what they represent. Young lives cut short, their potential unrealised and the intense and ongoing grief, loss and despair of those who loved them and continue a bitter-sweet remembrance.

But today, in this month of April, as a school, we once again stop and in silence focus and remember. We anticipate the solemn celebration of ANZAC Day next Wednesday, 25 April.  We think about what happened at Christmas Creek 26 years ago this Saturday, 21 April. And as we remember, we both enter into the events of the past and we make them present. As human beings we have the unique ability to be aware of both the past and future as well as the present, and also of how the past and the future impact on that present. It is true the past is never dead to those who would know how the present came to be. The dead are never dead as long as they inhabit the memory of the living, as who and what they were somehow become part of us.

Contemporary technology aids and reinforces this process and sense of connecting and human connectedness; the television programmes making stories out of the old sepia photographs and yellowing film footage. Young faces in uniform, looking out at us; faces we could have known. And so the story is told and retold. Gallipoli and the Burma Railway are no longer just pointless horror and meaningless disaster but they become part of our personal and community meaning; ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances and somehow transcending themselves. In the midst of the pity of war, the pity war distilled, the loyalty, the mateship, the self-sacrifice smothering fear and self-doubt, is what the Australian war poet John Manifold called ‘the courage chemically pure’. Somehow becoming what they otherwise might never have been – the stuff of myth and legend, encapsulating what at best we are, as human beings and as a nation.

It is this individual human quality which makes the dead facts of history live: not the self-serving official war histories by which Generals and politicians try to explain and justify what they did, not only to others but to their own also.

Always remember, never forget.

Most of you have been to the Memorial Outdoor Education campus at Marrapatta and been introduced to the reason for the memorial. You have seen the photos of Jill, Helen, John and Janelle; faces from the receding past looking out at us in our present. Frozen in time and forever young.

Only a very few of us now can say we knew them in life. I did. John was about my age. I taught Jill and Helen in Year 9 History. John and Janelle left two little girls who are now grown up. Helen and Jill were only just beginning to grow up. There were all the hopes and expectations of achievement and careers, love, marriage and children. Perhaps their daughters might have been here at Brisbane Girls Grammar today.

But at about 8.45 am on the morning of Saturday 20 April 1979, nearing their destination the bus passed through a gate into the property of local farmer, Mr Campbell, and John spoke to farm worker and local identity Mr Gilmore about the condition of the road. Receiving a reassuring answer, he left a message to be passed on to Mr Campbell: tell him I will see him tomorrow.

The bus proceeded slowly for about fifteen minutes. About five miles in, it stopped to allow John’s wife Janelle to close the gates as they left the property. It waited on a narrow section of unsealed road above a steep slope. Janelle re-entered the bus, which then slowly proceeded on its way. It negotiated a left hand curve in the road and then slowly down a slight grade. It was moving over to the edge of the roadway to avoid a spoon drain, when the earth under the passenger side rear wheel suddenly gave way causing the bus to leave the roadway, roll over several times and eventually come to rest on the banks of Christmas Creek, 150 feet from the roadway. John, Janelle, Helen and Jill were thrown out and killed instantly, while dazed and injured girls, some of them seriously injured, lay scattered down the hillside.

After Gallipoli, Australia was never to be the same again. After Christmas Creek, this School was never to be the same again. The massive suffering, destruction and loss of life in two world wars, could have sapped and destroyed the nations confidence and faith in its purpose. Cynicism and despair could have taken over. The Christmas Creek disaster could have spelt the end not only of the vision for Outdoor Education but for all adventurous innovation in the School.

Instead, in both cases, just the opposite occurred. The negatives became positives.

The courage, purpose and determination of the dead and injured somehow came alive in the hearts and minds of those left behind, in particularly vivid ways. Part of the reason is that this experience lies deeper than either of these events in the spiritual roots of our western culture. This is also the time of the celebration of Passover and Easter, of resurrection, new life, hope, victory over death. After winter there is always spring. Out of darkness there is always light. Out of despair, there is always hope. Out of all the deaths of our existence, there is always life.

For the Jewish tradition, this is Passover (Pesach) time, the heart and focus of the Jewish year. At Passover they not only remember but relive the liberation of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt, under the great prophet and law giver Moses, three and a half thousand years ago. This is the great founding event of Jewish faith and identity, the great historical myth of Israel, a celebration and affirmation of liberation and of eternal hope. No matter how often we are knocked down, we will get up again and go on. No matter how close we come to annihilation, the remnant will survive and return. This is the hope filled Jewish view of the meaning of all their national and religious history and it is enshrined in Hebrew poetry and iconography. Even thought the vine is cut down and the stump burnt, it will shoot and blossom and bear fruit again. And always, always, next year, next year at home, in Jerusalem.

This Jewish faith is the direct ancestor of and an integral part of Christian faith. Passover is the birth time of Christian tradition and identity – the death and resurrection of its founder, the Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth. Like Passover, Easter is also a celebration of hope and liberation. The good may be knocked down, even killed, but it is never ultimately destroyed. Goodness overcomes evil, hope overcomes despair, love overcomes hatred, life overcomes death. No matter what happens we shall overcome.

It is out of this context that we can believe the war dead and those who lost their lives at Christmas Creek have not died in vain. We will honour their memory by achieving what they sought to achieve, by being what they sought to be. They will continue to live in our memory and in our actions.

Wartime disaster helped shape and strengthen the sense of Australian identity and national character, giving it purpose and direction. They did not die in vain. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

After Christmas Creek, rather than retreating, the School and its wider community pulled together with determination to ensure that what had begun in disaster should go on to completion and the result is the splendid site and Outdoor Education programmes we have at Marrapatta today.

So here in remembrance, in this season of renewal, resurrection and hope, we make present those past lives that have become intertwined with our lives. We engage with the faces that look out at us from the old photographs. We name their names. We recall their deeds.

Their bodies are buried in peace. Their name liveth for evermore.     

Mrs Judith Tudball, Dean of of Co-curriculum

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

The concept of educational travel is not a new one. In his poem Ithaka, the modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy outlines the lessons learnt on a journey when he writes about the eventful progress of the hero Odysseus home from Troy and the wealth he has gained along the way (Waldron, 2009). Similarly, the great Victorian poet Lord Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem Ulysses, writes of the spiritual and intellectual imperatives of life-long journeying. Tennyson’s Ulysses (Odysseus) cannot rest from travelling life to the fullest.

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.

Clearly, the concept of life-wide learning through travel has great significance across cultures and ages, and is elegantly summed up in this famous aphorism attributed to Chinese Philosopher Confucius

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

In December 2008, all Australian Education Ministers endorsed The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. This declaration acknowledged that major changes in the world, along with increased global integration and international mobility, have placed new demands on education, and as a consequence, new and exciting opportunities for Australians are emerging. These opportunities are heightening the need to nurture an appreciation of, and respect for, cultural diversity, and a sense of global citizenship. Similarly, Global Perspectives: a Framework for global education in Australian schools, developed in 2008, places great emphasis on promoting open-mindedness leading to new thinking about the world and developing a predisposition to take action for change. ‘Twenty-first century Australians are members of a global community, connected to the whole world by ties of culture, economics and politics, enhanced communication and travel and a shared environment’ (Global Perspectives, p.2).

In other words, the ‘hands-on’ experience of educational travel with all its diverse opportunities is the broadest possible highway to genuine global citizenship. Brisbane Girls Grammar School prides itself on the scope of international engagement and educational travel opportunities on offer for our students to assist them in developing the necessary knowledge and skills to actively participate in promoting positive values with a global perspective. We aspire to be a leader in exceptional scholarship, and this is underpinned by the guiding principle of life-wide learning.

The Learning Outside the Classroom Manifesto released in the United Kingdom in 2006 states that ‘every young person should experience the world beyond the classroom as an essential part of learning and personal development, whatever their age, ability or circumstance’. The document outlines the belief that learning outside the classroom can often provide the most memorable learning experiences and help to make sense of the world around us by creating links between feelings and learning. Studies have shown us that ‘we can appreciate much more through being, doing, sensing, feeling, knowing and changing’ (Beard, Wilson and McCarter 2007:5, cited in Jackson, 2011). In addition, researchers in memory studies suggest that extraordinary events, such as travel experiences, stand out and are distinctive because they create flashbulb memories (Myers, 2003, cited in Jong-Hyeong, 2010). These flashbulb memories are exceptionally vivid and long lasting and are created because travel experiences are significantly different from those of everyday life.

The International Affiliate Schools Programme at Brisbane Girls Grammar School commenced in 1978 and is now in its thirty-fourth year. Its original intent was to provide Girls Grammar students with opportunities to meet students from other countries both on their home ground as well as on ours; to develop further understanding of diverse cultures; and to encourage students to use their target language in ‘real life’ experiences and communication. The programme has enabled countless students the opportunity to travel to France, Germany, Japan and China on school facilitated study tours incorporating home-stay periods with families. In particular, it is estimated that since its inception, over 250 Girls Grammar students have participated in the exchange programme with our French Affiliate School Lycée Saint Paul in Angoulême.

In addition to the Affiliate Schools programme, the School offers a Latin Study Tour to Italy, and in June this year, the inaugural Creative Arts/Humanities Study Tour will depart to New York and north eastern United States of America for two weeks of immersion in cultural and enrichment experiences. In a somewhat different direction, the biennial USA Space Camp will be offered for the twelfth time in 2013, bringing a total of 300 students having participated in this experience over the past twenty years.  Space Camp has proved to be a transformative experience for many of our students who have been exposed to new science concepts and have faced many associated cognitive challenges. Similarly, the Centre for Scientific Research offers opportunities for girls to extend their scientific capabilities through a suite of programmes such as the International Young Physicist’s Tournament (IYPT), the Junior Young Physicist’s Tournament (JYPT) and the Science Olympiads. Once again, a Girls Grammar student has gained selection in the Australian IYPT Team to compete in Germany in July 2012.

The Antipodeans programme, remodelled in 2010 to encompass a yearly departure for Year 12 leavers, has consistently attracted large groups of participants: forty for Cambodia in 2010; forty-two for Borneo in 2011; and thirty-eight for China in 2012. This programme involves an element of service and personal challenge in an international environment and provides opportunities for students to further develop leadership skills.

Nothing grows self-belief and confidence quite like being put into new situations in a developing country. The programme allows you to take control of the trip but in a way that is safe and protected. We made all our own decisions about where to stay. What to eat, how we’d get from one place to another, how we would manage our budget – it truly is a unique and invaluable experience.
Ms S McGarry, Antipodeans Coordinator, Borneo Expedition

Undoubtedly, the girls who take up the challenge of the Antipodeans programme return home as young women who are more grounded and more outwardly focused.

Since 2010, forty-six Girls Grammar students have participated in the Oxbridge Academic Summer Programmes. These programmes, accessible by Year 11 students, are based on the founding principles of imaginative teaching, experiential learning and cultural enrichment. Student and staff participants experience living and studying for short periods in historic and prestigious centres of learning in cities as diverse as Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and New York.

With the ever-increasing emphasis on global awareness in education, and the value placed on scholarship in our new Aspiration, the School turns its mind to imagining creative international engagement opportunities that encompass academic rigour and elements of personal challenge, while promoting international mindfulness in our students. The challenge now lies in imagining and designing future enrichment opportunities with an international perspective.

References

Cavafy, C. P., (2001). In Being alive. Astley N. (ed.). Bloodaxe Books: Great Britain.

Confucius, Retrieved March 21, 2012, from http://thinkexist.com/quotation/i_hear_and_i_forget-i_see_and_i_remember-i_do_and/147445.html

Curriculum Corporation. (2008). Global Perspectives: A framework for global education in Australian Schools. Curriculum Corporation: Carlton.

Department for Education and Skills. (2006). Learning Outside the Classroom Manifesto. Retrieved March 9, 2012, from https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/LOtC.pdf

McGarry, S. (2010). Antipodeans Coordinator, Borneo, retrieved March 21, 2012, from http://www.antipodeans.com.au/expedition/expedition.htm

Jackson, N. (2011). ‘Work Integrated’ to ‘Life-Wide’ Learning: Changing a University’s Conceptions of Curriculum. Retrieved August 8, 2011, from http://lifewidecurriculum.pbworks.com/f/From+work+integrated+to+life+wide+learning.pdf

Jong-Hyeong, K. (2010). Determining the Factors Affecting the Memorable Nature of Travel Experiences, Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 27:8, 780-796, retrieved March 9, 2012, from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10548408.2010.526897

Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. (2008). The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. Commonwealth Government: Melbourne.

Tennyson, A. (1960). Selected poems of Tennyson. Heinemann: London.

Waldron, M. (2009). Intelligent Travel – Educational Travel Actively Engages Multiple Intelligences and Produces Self-Directed Learners. ACIS White Paper.