The Brilliant Words of Prof. Herbert W. Vilakazi

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Unifying values and practice in child and youth care programmes:

"The problems of children and of youth, giving rise to child and youth care programs, can only begin to be solved in that society of humankind’s dream; a more collective-oriented society than at present, when the father of the child shall be every man as old as the child’s father; when the mother of the child shall be every woman as old as the child’s mother; a society of responsibility of the entire community; a society without poverty; without the inequalities of society members, based upon race, class, or sex; a society without the use of violence against other members of society; a society without any exploitation and oppression of any group by any other group; a society of equals; a thoroughly democratic society; last, but not least a society that shall have, once more, incorporated productive labour into the educational process."

The notion that children are our future is undeniable. It is from the minds and souls of children that every future discovery, every idea, every solution and all hope will come. Herbert Vilakazi's opening address to the National Association of Child Care Workers 1991 Biennial Conference (http://tinyurl.com/yfxzdwn) in South Africa provides brilliant insight to how we need to think and act if we are to support today's children as our gifts to the future.

We cannot know where the next Beethoven, Einstein or Mother Teresa will come from. Great things are possible, and probable as human history has proven. Educators today need to support children's natural curiosity and spirit to learn in ways that don't stifle or restrict their potential to do these great things. The world we know is changing, and it always has, but not at the rate or in the manner we are witnessing today. Today, in the midst of what amounts to a perfect storm within the social, political, geographical, technological and economic realms of the new global society, transformational change is inevitable. To deny this would be ridiculous. To deny that we as citizens of the emerging global society must be proactive to ensure the transformation is managed effectively, and results in an improved society, would be even more ridiculous. 

Within his 1991 address, Professor Vilakazi touches on what I believe to be the key to managing the transformation of our world. With respect to the issue of caring for children he states that,

We are not further along, than peasant culture, in our knowledge of child psychology. What we should do, in our efforts to increase and improve our knowledge of child psychology, is not only to study what our specialists child psychologists have written, but also to go out to learn, and collect, and record, and collate carefully, the psychological and psychoanalytic theory of childhood contained in peasant cultures, and to integrate or synthesize the two. This applies to all spheres of knowledge.

I believe Vilakazi is saying that there is contemporary wisdom to be gained through modern scientific processes that will help us continue to learn and develop insight into how to maximize our support for children, but also that there exists timeless wisdom yet to be acknowledged by contemporaries about how caregivers have effectively supported children since the beginning of mankind. It is the integrative nature of combining the two spheres of wisdom that would allow us the largest capacity to package our 'gifts to the future' so the promises we intend them to offer will be fully realized.

Our human tendency to debate opposing ideologies without apology until one is accepted by a majority resulting in a "winning" idea or concept is counter-intuitive to progress. On the contrary, the integrative mind understands that within the current change climate we find ourselves immersed in, our viability as a global society will depend on a synthesis of ideas that should not be considered dichotomous, but rather complementary to one another. By taking two or more perspectives on effective and positive child development and combining their best elements into a synthesized hybrid of all of them, a new paradigm is born, and those who brought each perspective to the process no longer operate independently and in defense of their point of view, but rather interdependently in support of each other and the best possible course of action.

I believe that our children will be best prepared for the future when we as KARE-givers are able to move to an interdependent and proactive paradigm of child development that acknowledges and celebrates diverse thoughts and theories no matter where, and from what point in history they originate.

Why Learning from PowerPoint Lectures is Frustrating

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Carolyn Blogs » Blog Archive » Why Learning from PowerPoint Lectures is Frustrating:
My response- The key in my opinion is engaging the audience, and to do the chalk and talk w/o criticism, why not use a wiki or workspace to present the material? Unlimited links, graphics, quotes, discussion points… whatever, can be presented in an open-system style of lecture, and if you have a tablet or are using an interactive whiteboard, you can even write chalkboard style to the screen.

At the end of the day, all who are interested get the URL to the site to peruse at their liesure, and anyone who wants to “take notes” during the lecture can do that too. The really great element of a wiki or workspace though is the continuity they provide. If you set up a site to start, and create a new page for each lecture you do, the whole deal marches on in a distributed learning format that doesn’t end when the lecture ends… great ideas and contributions don’t follow the same timeline as our 1 or 2 hour lectures.

Check out:
wikispaces.com
pbworks.com
for excellent (and free) web services to set up lectures this way

What's the deal with the "business vs. education" dichotomy?

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Why do those of us in education seemingly vilify the "business" model of leadership and management? I understand that the business world has its entirely negative examples of bonus and incentive-driven motivational methods, but there is no shortage of this paradigm in education either... so what is it about the business world that educators despise so much?

Perhaps we in education don't want to understand how the business world runs because we're anxious about the possibility that we can learn something from it. This insecurity about what we do and how we do it manifests in the rather arrogant perspective that we do things better; more principled and with a heightened sense of ethics in education. I don't agree.

One thing the business world has going for it is the degree to which it is scrutinized by the consuming public it serves. Consumers have a right to demand strong value, excellent service and quality products. The maximum bottom-line profit depends on the degree to which a business can provide this to consumers. A heightened sense of self-protective vigilance of behalf of consumers has resulted in a sort of contemporary "conscience" that hasn't been prevalent up unitl now. Concepts like the "triple bottom line" (aka 'people, planet, profit') are a welcome sign of the times... the fact is, in order for business to make money in today's world, business must be sensitive to not only the purchasing needs of its consuming customers, but their social perspectives and concerns too; the profit margin is at stake.

So the way I see it, the business world needs to do whatever it takes to make sure it makes money, and these days, a heightened awareness of the consumer perespective and willingness to think outside the box to serve that perspective seems to be what it takes. If in fact this is what the business world is doing, I believe we in the education world should not only be applauding the effort, but emulating it as well.

There is no time in the world today for polarity. The debate over who is right and who is wrong often, if not always, fogs our view over what is best, and what is best can come from anywhere... the key in every aspect of our society is to look at everything from the perspective of what makes sense AND produces results. This "thinking outside the box" mentality, or integrative thinking is what will win the day as we move forward into uncharted progress... we shouldn't care where the idea comes from, but rather exploit the fact that it's a good one and make use of it to optimize our bottom-line, no matter what field we find ourselves working within.

Real Teaching First

I am admittedly a bit confused... as much as the Real Learning First Initiative in Alberta is undeniably positive, I'm wondering where teacher welfare fits into the fold. In my mind, the practice of teachers who are well-prepared and supported by their profession will be optimized creating an excellent teaching and learning atmosphere in our schools. I think a Real Teaching First initiative should exist alongside the Real Learning First initiative; or perhaps call it the Real Learning and Teaching Initiative.

Resiliency- What is it really?

As a young teacher who really didn't know much about how to teach kids, despite what my crisp diploma indicated, I knew in very short order that there was more to the game than I had bargained for. The variables that affect a child's ability to achieve in school are overwhelming for teachers; genetic variables, social variables, cognitive variables... and we're not even the ones suffering the effects personally. Knowing how much these variables affect our disposition and state of balance, imagine how much they affect the kids who manifest them.

I'm not sure, to be honest, if most kids who are born knowing nothing different than the environment that these variables shape and form really are affected all that much. The environment kids are born into is all they know, and therefore becomes their default "normal." In my experience, it's not until children get older, usually around the middle school age, that they begin to realize that the other kids don't necessarily live the same sort of life they do. This is when a different perspective begins to take shape. The child's private logic becomes altered. I believe it's at this time in a young persons' life that supports are most critical, and they need to be maintained through to adulthood.

The question is, really, where are these supports supposed to come from? There are differences of opinion on this, but the research reality is that in an overwhelming large number of cases, this support comes from a teacher. For this reason it is massively important that all teachers are ready to respond positively when a student decides to seek their support. How can we be ready to face this challenge? To me the answer is simple... we need to understand resilience; we need to be resilient ourselves and we need to know how to foster resilience in others. Resilience is nothing new, but the formal study of risk, resilience and recovery has been altering the perspective of conventional wisdom in contemporary fields of psychology, social work, education and other social sciences lately, and I'm happy about that.

Whether we understand why a child chooses one of us to be the person he reaches out to for care and support doesn't matter; we just need to be ready to respond appropriately and effectively. Teachers need to consider ourselves as process advocates in a wrap-a-round system that can be daunting for those most vulnerable and disengaged. In lieu of judgment and deficit-based thinking, we need to adopt a strengths-based focus that divines the good in young people experiencing distress and hardship. There is no other way.

I'm interested to hear how teachers do this... how have you supported a young person in distress, and more importantly, how did your support help? Often we may never know years later after our connection is lost, but it validates everything we do when we are privileged to know. There is nothing better and more uplifting for teachers to hear a story of success about one of their more challenged kids.

I would like to hear your success stories. We don't tell them often enough.