Stacey Harker
Mary-Anne Neal
Royal Roads University
EDLM 525

February 15, 2013

Assignment 2: Journal Entry and Self Portrait

My time since September has been intense. I work, study, and parent from the moment I finish my morning cup of coffee to an hour before bed. This goes on seven days a week and I’ve made many embarrassing mistakes because of my greatly overscheduled life. I have carefully considered ways to make more time, but the options are untenable. To make matters worse, my husband has lost work and my teaching assignment has been further intensified. Last week I was re-assigned an English 12 course and given two hours to prepare for a class of students who had already bonded with another teacher. This week I spent five days in bed with the flu. I can hardly believe this is my life.

The good news is that except for the limited number of hours in the day, I very much enjoy these too many things in my life and I am learning a lot. Indeed, my studies have helped me observe and respond to the unexpectedly chaotic mess my life has become, and I am sharing my leaning with my students. Most recently, my study of learning styles has informed my practice. I took the VARK and the results reinforced my general understanding of my multimodal learning preferences inclined toward visual and audial learning. Kinesthetic learning was not a distant third, but reading and writing was left in the dust: an irony not lost on me, an English teacher. I am fully aware that reading is not my preferred way of learning. I don’t even make a recipe if it does not come with a personal recommendation or a picture of the final product. Perhaps the old adage is true: We teach what we most want to learn.

Conversely, my Kolb results revealed no real preference. I have considered three possible reasons for the inconsistency between the two tests. The first was that the scenarios on the Kolb did not resonate with my experience, so my answers could not accurately reflect my learning styles. My second thought was that I am truly without preference. Although this idea of myself as a fence-sitter does not sit very well with my ego and I am tempted to dismiss it out of hand, I can’t help but remember that my Meyers-Briggs test, a major focus of my previous reflective journal, defined me as equally weakly inclined. In that case I determined that I was in fact not unremarkable but rather dynamic. My ego likes dynamic. Third thought: personality tests are bunk. Third didn’t fit with my goals for this stage of my learning, so I tried the test again but got the same results. Unexceptional or multitalented: in the end it is up to me and Lady Luck.

Luck seems to have little to do with the swashbuckling Kolb graphic, however. With its symmetry and visual allusion to mathematical precision, the graph seems to cover all the bases. It allows for a multitude of possibilities because it flows in many directions. It seems to hold all the answers, yet defining learning with the precision of x-y axes would be folly. I use different learning styles for different circumstances, and I may make my choice of preferred style on nothing more tangible than a whim. In truth, I cannot determine my learning preference(s) until the moment I begin learning because learning is contextual and complex. Peter Vaill supports this concept in Learning as a Way of Being (1996).

“Learning as a way of being is a whole mentality. It is a way of
being in the world. Although I have listed seven modes of it, they
are twists of the learning kaleidoscope. They should not be thought
of as having independent existence or as items that we can work on
one at a time. More than just a skill, learning as a way of being is a
whole posture toward experience, a way of framing or interpreting
all experience as a learning opportunity or a learning process”(p.51).

I counsel my students to be open to the experience of learning. I tell them the best way to do that is to study in ways that make them happy. My theory is that when they are happy to learn, they will not be in a mindset that rejects the experience. Being happy is not as simple as being entertained. I could be the best show on Earth, but if a student hasn’t eaten, is distracted by events in their life, or suffers irrational feelings of inadequacy, I can’t divert their attention for long. I tell them that if they want to learn, they need to take care of all of their affairs, not just their homework. I also advise them to always do their best, and that this can be very different than ideal best. All of this takes the courage of continuous openness to varying degrees of success. Funny thing is, once they let go of their desire for success and move toward doing their best, their focus becomes more meta-cognitive. Their intellectual gaze is led away from their marks and toward the possibility of learning from their mistakes. I believe my intuitively generated advice is supported by Vaill’s seven “qualities of learning” (p.56).

Although my beliefs about learning have not changed much since I began my MA in Educational Leadership and Management, my awareness of school dynamics have been greatly enhanced. I now know what a school plan is and the purpose it serves. I am surprised that school improvement plans were not a topic of my teacher education training. It seems so fundamental to school improvement. I was dismayed to find that the plan at my school was essentially a secret kept by the principal, nevertheless my interest in the document and subsequent paper improved my understanding of the scope of professional expertise and the possibilities of our school.

Our MA assignment to improve school goals was engaging, and I was able to apply the concept in my classroom. I now have students write out SMART goals for their learning at the beginning of each course. This not only serves as an exercise in controlling an idea and clearly expressing it in writing, the goals themselves become learning tools as students progress through the course and discover how well they achieve their goals.

I am also more aware of the role the schools play in the community. This has helped our Outreach Worker who always goes out into the community feeling like she is begging for students. When I learned that schools are strongly encouraged to increase the fluency of the parents, I realized that Adult Education is important to more than just the immediate realm of our interested students.

I have started a webpage that catalogues all of my MAELM writing and plan to morph this page into my eportfolio. I am struggling with layout. It feels visually boring, yet I’m not certain how to change this. I would like to take a course on web design, but this is an impractical goal at this busy time. Not having the desired expertise and being somewhat unclear about expectations for the final portfolio has proven a bit frustrating. Recent re-reading of Learning as a Way of Being, however, has turned me around a bit on that matter. Feeling discouraged by a lack of expertise in creating an eportfolio was me in white water and not asking for help, burdening my self-worth with my personal deficiencies on this project, not being willing to get it wrong the first time, losing my sense of humour, wanting a prescribed fix, and not living in the moment. I laughed as I read my notes in the margin that said I needed to work on two or three of Vaill’s list of nine key incompetencies (pp. 82-3). Then there I was exhibiting six of them! I am relieved my sense of humour wasn’t too far gone.

Self Portrait

A lot of what Vaill seems to be proposing involves giving up control while maintaining a sense of purpose and the faith that I will learn in a world where change is the only predictable constant. To remind me of this lesson, my self-portrait image will be of Fortuna, the Roman personification of luck. Fortuna can bring good luck but can also bring bad luck. Sometimes she is blind, and is often depicted balancing on a sphere. She is a symbol of the capriciousness of life. In tune with turbulence, she would have been Vaill’s best student.

References

Fortuna Image. Retrieved February 15, 2013 from

http://www.crystalinks.com/fortuna.html

Vaill, Peter. Learning as a Way of Being. 1996. Jossey Bass, San Francisco.