– a Singaporean teacher's storeroom π
friends always ask what do I do at work@SCCL. this card more or less summarised a key activity – engaging CL teachers in deep conversation, and shifting their epistemology, one question at a time. θ°’θ°’η΄ ε¨ Doris for your kind words, and may your eyes be shining (Zander, 2012) for a long long time to come too (: #2017ζζζδΉηζεΈθη€Όη© #throwback #2017TeachersDay #lifeOfaTeacherEducator
saw this TEDxPortland video shot last year only recently. while revisiting it that i noticed the opening words of the presenter:
“How many of you are creatives, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, or maybe you just have a really big imagination? Show of hands? … That’s most of you. I have some news for us creatives.”
what’s the significance of this short opening exchange?
i was quite surprised by some responses of people after they have watched the video, for example, “i feel scared”, “what if the machines are going to replace us”, “i admire those who are retiring soon”. but there again, these are quite normal too. however, i did not quite figure out the paradigm behind people with such responses. until, i revisited the video, and heard the opening exchange a second time.
my current hypothesis: people who produces such (downward spiral) responses are not knowledge creators. such words represent the mindset of industrial age production workers – routine, mass-production, clock-in-clock-out, predictability just to name a few. there’s no right or wrong judgment here. but in our business of preparing children for the knowledge age (or augmented age in the video), and where teachers’ beliefs influenced their actions, we need to think like and become a knowledge creator ourselves. what can we do to facilitate this shift in a major bulk of our teachers who learnt and grew up and laboured in the industrial age paradigm for a large part of their lives? how do we help teachers to shift into the creatives, designers, artists mode of thinking?
almost forget, here’s the video:
#enjoy