As the semester is drawing nearer to the end, I am going to talk about some things from my placement I have missed here. In November Culture Step went on a trip to the Leibur bread factory. Many people said that this was one of their favourite events of the programme and it is easy to see why. Leibur makes many types of bread that are popular in Estonia and Finland. Estonian rye bread (leib) is dark and a little sweet, and when it is made freshly, I think it's delicious! At the open air museum I tried it with home made butter, it was delightful! Leibur also makes white bread, and even products that are somewhere between the density of rye bread and white bread. Our guide says that a variety of bread is popular in Estonia. I have certainly found that open sandwiches are available everywhere, and often when eating lunch out, there will be unlimited bread provided with your meal. One reason this trip was particularly interesting because it shows a perspective of Estonia that we don't usually get to see. This is not your usual guided tour, and by learning about how the food that Estonians eat every day is made, we can gain insights about what we can buy in the supermarkets too. This is the kind of education that is often overlooked for integration, but it is very useful. We all have to eat, and it is a good way to form connections with the local culture, know what products are local and delicious and to save money on shopping. Bread is very important in Estonian daily life, so learning about bread makes sense in order to understand more about Estonian culture. We even saw rye bread that was extremely thin, and our guide explained that this is for people who only want a tiny bit of bread for their sandwich! So even if you are not a big bread fan, Estonia has a kind of bread for you! Another very informative trip was to the Estonian parliament. This was incredibly interesting for me as I find politics fascinating and this is the place where Estonian laws and policies are made. This is also one of the oldest parliament buildings in the world. The parliament is part of a medieval castle called Toompea Castle, and more modern additions have been built on to the old walls. We were very lucky, because on the usual tours, the public are not able to go up the old tower. But we were able to go up the old tower at sun set! This was one of the best views of Tallinn I have seen, and it made me imagine what the view would be like hundreds of years ago. We then took a tour inside of the building, which was much warmer! It was interesting to see that the interior of one of the buildings is apparently built in the expressionist style of architecture. This means that it has many unusual features, most notably zig zags and diagonal lines used a lot. Annleena, who showed us around told us that these angles are meant to represent the many angles that the politicians should consider when considering issues in parliament. That's something that we need to keep in mind as adult educators too! Local politics is another important area that really helps to learn about a particular place you have moved to. This can often be a means for exclusion for newcomers, because they might not know about the different parties or issues in that country. It definitely helps to have a little understanding of this area. Actually, education in politics and citizenship education is often neglected in all levels of education in the UK. This means that British citizens are often lacking in knowledge about politics and so would find it difficult to explain to friends who are from outside of the UK. I think more awareness of how political systems work is crucial to living in a country. For us, this is not just an area that needs expanding in adult education for integration, but also in schools and community education. Finally, we had a culture step party to celebrate the first round of graduates from the programme, and I was one of the graduates! The party had some traditional Estonian folk music and we did some dances to this. It was a really fun way to finish the programme and it made me consider the links between Estonian culture and my own. The dances are similar to some folk dances that happen in Britain too! It was great to see all the people that did the culture step programme graduating, and it was like we built a family over the course of all that we learned together. This was a fitting way to finish the programme, and the community will still remain on social media, with possible meetings of alumni in the future.
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This week I am going to write my reflections on the process of designing a mini online course with a group of my IMAESC classmates. This was an exciting assignment, because our instructor created a real platform on which we could use Moodle to create our own online courses. I really appreciated the chance to be able to do this. There can often be a disconnect between theory and reality, and often we can talk about things that we would like to do in theory, but aren't given the opportunity to experiment with how they would work in practice. I have used Moodle as a student, and a little bit as a teacher, but I didn't receive great training in how to use it at the time. This meant I often neglected it. I found this version of Moodle very easy to use, once I watched some of the instruction videos on Youtube. We were tasked with coming up with our own mini-course, for which we chose everything; the topic, audience, pedagogy, assessment methods... which seemed like a big challenge at first! We created a whatsapp group and google folder to help us arrange things, but our best tactic for talking about these issues was having face-to-face meetings in our group. I was extremely happy with the way that my group worked together, I felt that everyone listened to each other and was respectful of others' views and came up with interesting ideas that stuck to the task. The first suggestion was from Yumi, who wanted to do a cooking course. The rest of the group thought that this could be a little difficult to do in an online course, and wouldn't tap into much of our pedagogical knowledge. Thiago suggested that we could use the topic of the environment, as he used to be a geography teacher, he knows a lot about this subject. Although I am not an expert on this subject, I believe it is one of the most important issues facing humans right now, and felt that I might be able to expand my knowledge by developing this course. I hope that Yumi didn't mind that her initial suggestion was out-voted. When working in a group it is a difficult balance between listening to others' ideas and allowing them to bloom and getting across your own ideas. This is one of the reasons I felt that this group worked well, because everyone did listen to each other. I wonder if this was also something to do with the fact that we have already been classmates for a year, and know each other quite well. Anyway, I was grateful to have them as my team-mates! When we had decided our topic, we thought that our audience could be adult educators. This would stick to what we knew about, and meant it might be useful for us in the future. When we said this in our subsequent meeting with our instructor, he told us that it would be better to be more specific about the audience for the course. 'What kind of adult educators'? So when we met next, this was the question on our lips. However, I think in our quest to 'narrow down' our audience, we somehow made it too narrow. We decided on adult educators working with migrants. But in our feedback from Andreas, he told us that we would have to make the topic of environmental issues explicitly related to migrants. But we were really only able to justify it in terms of the fact that it is important for everyone in communities to have an understanding of environmental issues and what they can do about them. Our criticism from our tutor meant that we were in a difficult situation. We met again, and were trying to relate the issues more specifically to migrants, but we didn't want to have a top-down approach, in which we told migrants that they should recycle more etc. We wanted to be more critical, using a social-constructivist pedagogic model to allow the students to build knowledge together. But this was very difficult to explicitly relate to one group in a community. We realised it might be better to broaden our audience to community educators. What we wanted to discuss was going to involve the whole community, not just migrants, which made it hard to relate our objectives specifically to. This was a challenge, because we had to change some of the work we had already done, but this feedback from our tutor definitely improved the quality of our course. Because the course consists of four weeks, we decided it would be the fairest split of the work-load if one group member took charge of one week each. Together we came up with our learning objectives and pedagogy, and then individually we went out and found content and wrote questions for our particular topic. We then met together again when this was mostly finished to make sure that there was a natural flow between our weeks and a consistent format. I was worried that this might be a huge challenge, because we all have unique styles of structuring our work. We had a meeting to talk about our different sections, but actually found it pretty easy to agree on how we would make our course flow nicely. For example I had initially put my learning materials as links at the end of my week, but I noticed that Thiago had incorporated them as hyperlinks in a list, which meant he could include them before the discussion questions. This made sense to the natural flow of the course so we agreed to all do this in our weeks. I had to tweak my content, but was happy to do so to make sure that the course had a flow that would work better for the students. I think it would be confusing to me if I did a course which had a different lay-out each week. Designing this course was a practical exercise in how to apply social constructivist pedagogy to an online format. We have already learned about how it is important to build a social and cognitive presence in addition to the teaching presence, in order to build an effective educational experience online (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007). We decided that we wanted to try to foster a social presence by using forum discussion questions that were designed to have students share and build knowledge together. This is also in the spirit of non-formal community education, so we anticipated that this would be appropriate for our target students who worked in this field. However, this involves careful consideration about discussion questions that will stimulate effective dialogue between the students. A closed question like 'have you seen this in your community?' could stimulate a short yes/no response. On the other hand, a question that is too complicated or overly difficult might be off-putting to students to respond to. We each thought carefully about the questions for our weeks, and gave each other feedback about them. We also decided to ask students to create a blog so that they could engage in critical reflection about the course. Reflection has been seen as important in bridging the gap between surface level and deep learning, in which the learner can try to apply the meaning of materials to their previous knowledge (Moon, 2004). We knew that this would be an important element for our target students, because they would each be bringing the unique and complex understandings of their own communities. Interestingly, it is these components of dialogue with peers and critical reflection that I feel make our course different from existing online courses about environmental issues. It is these specific factors of our pedagogical design that mean that community educators can together build the awareness of environmental issues that is necessary for them to be able to apply them to their contexts. Because reflection is a crucial component of building a professional identity for adult educators, this element relates the topics that we brought about the environment to their professional context. Additionally, the course calls for this approach because only the learners themselves are aware of the specific needs of their communities. If I were designing an online course in the future, I think I could apply a lot of what I learned during this process, along with deeper understandings that I gained from the course in general. The biggest challenge in our group was trying to specify a target audience and make sure that our course offered something new. We managed to fine-tune these areas during the design process of the course and I think that we overcame the hurdle. However, in the future it would save time and be much more helpful to have a clearer idea about these before the design process started. Personally, I liked the experience of planning with a group of my peers, and I hope that I might be able to do that in future in my work. I also know that I was lucky to have such a nice group to work with, and I hope that I was able to walk the difficult line between expressing my ideas and not speaking over others. I think communication was central to this pleasant working experience. It's also certainly helpful to bounce ideas off one another and to share the responsibilities and challenges together. I think to get the fullest picture of the effectiveness of our course, the next step would be to see how it would work in practice, with real students enrolled in it. In my teaching experience, there are always unforeseen hurdles that come up in reality, when you get to the classroom, and I feel that an online course is no different. Would the students get involved in the forums? Would our decision not to include face-to-face classes in order to keep the course flexible backfire, and de-motivate them? Those would be some of my worries, and part of the process would be flexibility in listening to students responses' and needs as the course progressed. Teachers need to know when to step in and when to listen, and these can only be practiced in the process of a real course. I don't know yet whether I will be an online teacher in the future, but it's definitely something that I've become more interested in, during the process of this course in teaching online! References
We had quite a range of seminars for the placement, facilitated by different organisations of adult education in Tallinn.
On Saturday the culture steppers took a trip to the open air museum! This museum is a short bus journey out of the city centre and I definitely recommend that you visit it. Katrin from the Estonian institute told us that Estonians love to come here and that there are many events here throughout the year! So this museum is a must if you would like to learn more about Estonian history and culture! This museum uses a few unique ways to help people discover more about Estonian history. it's great to be able to learn outdoors, and since the natural world is such a big part of Estonian culture, it makes sense that this museum combines a museum with nature. There are numerous traditional Estonian buildings, many of them are original structures from the nineteenth century, relocated to the museum. It really felt like I was stepping back in time exploring them! We split into small groups and followed an adventure using our smartphones. This had a map of the museum and various puzzles to solve once we reached the locations on the map. This was a cool way to help us to interact with the objects and also the people working in the museum! I won't spoil the puzzles for you, but I will share a picture of one of the objects we found that was part of the trail - the Lestovka, used for prayer in the Russian orthodox tradition. Later, the people working in the museum told us about some of the traditions at the Setu farm part of the museum site. As I've already mentioned, I love to learn about culture through food, and today was no exception. We got to drink some tea prepared in a traditional way, with some sugar that stays in your mouth while you drink. We also tried a traditional cake, which was apparently very healthy! There are some goats living next to the farm house, so we also said hello to them! There was a small exhibition on various cultures living in Estonia, including Russians, Armenians and Polish among many other nationalities. We were encouraged to research a particular group and then to share what we found with the rest of our party. It was really great to see that we were encouraged to learn about even more cultures living in Estonia! This was a fantastic learning experience and if you want to visit the museum I strongly encourage you to do so! I will try to go again before I leave because there wasn't time to see everything there because it is so big! The rest of the culture steppers will have another chance to visit in a couple of weeks, so I hope they will take the opportunity (I'll add some of my pictures on the facebook group to show anyone who didn't go this time how interesting it was)!
Hours this week at placement: 6 hours The last week has been incredibly busy for me, with various deadlines for courses, presentations to give and trips with culture step! I am feeling tired but happy! Since I last posted an update I have been to three events with the culture steppers. The first event was a handbell concert and the Estonia concert hall. We gathered in the lobby before the performance, a few people came up to me to ask whether I had spare tickets (because I was holding the tickets for other culture steppers), so it was definitely a popular concert! The hand bell is apparently not a traditional Estonian instrument, but this group of musicians has made it pretty popular and travelled the world playing concerts! This was my first experience of going to a concert in Estonia, and I very much enjoyed it. I noticed that people dress up very nicely to go to concerts here, mostly in the UK we are more informal. Having walked past the concert hall a lot on my way to the old town, I was glad to finally see inside. The decor is very grand, but it doesn't feel overwhelmingly big, giving it a warmer atmosphere than some other concert halls I've been to. 'I went to a concert yesterday' was another must learn phrase from my Estonian language app, and it is obviously important to many Estonians! The next event was a trip to Tartu. We were there to visit the Estonian National Museum, which is a little bit outside of the centre, but luckily we had time for a quick stroll around the sights of the city. Lea was a student at Tartu university, so she was able to tell us a lot about the history! She said it's her favourite city in Estonia, and it's easy to see why it is so popular. There is a lot of green space, and the trees were beautiful and golden with the colours of autumn while we were there. We headed to the National Museum next, which is a uniquely designed modern building and I can see why it won a 'European museum of the year' award. The museum's permanent collection is an interactive timeline of Estonian history, and alongside the fascinating clothes, books and artefacts on display, there are a wide range of multi-sensory experiences for visitors to interact with. Exhibit captions are written in Estonian, but with a special card, visitors can tap the caption and change it to their own language, allowing people from many countries to learn from the collection, but not having to show huge amounts of text, which can be off-putting. This day at the museum was special because there was a festival to celebrate the Finno-Urgic peoples. These people include Estonians, Finns and Hungarians, who have their own states but also includes groups such as Sámi, who live in the north of the Nordic countries, and Mordvins, Udmuts, Maris, Komis and Karelians who are living in Russia. But there are others too! All of these groups have languages that share common root words which are usually the early words formed in a language (nature, body, numbers, animals etc.). There are also grammatical similarities between them, and they all lack gendered pronouns or articles (the Estonian for both he and she is 'ta'). We were able to attend a concert, in which groups of people from different Finno-Urgic nations wore traditional dress, played instruments, sang and danced. I think it is great that Estonia holds this Finno-Urgic festival to celebrate the connections that run between other cultures. The museum also has a second permanent exhibition called Echo of the Urals, which is devoted entirely to the history of the Finno-Urgic people. It was a wonderful experience to see that Estonia is treasuring these traditions and languages (related to, but different to their own). I think this understanding is a very important part of my journey of learning about Estonian culture. It shows that to really understand Estonain culture, we have to realise that there are multiple cultures that are relevant and related. It is important to preserve histories and cultural memory and I am so glad that Culture Step included this festival as a part of its programme. We also shared some food together and I finally tried kefir, which I've been scared to try because I do not like milk. It's a healthy fermented milk which is supposed to be very good for your gut. It was mixed with kama, which is a healthy mix of grains and peas made into a fine powder and luckily also sugar, so it tasted nice to me! Maybe I've said it before, but I think you can learn a lot about a culture from sharing food together! The whole day was fascinating and fun and we arrived back to Tallinn tired and ready for bed!
The next day we had another event to go to, it was the time of the month for another Estonishing Evening (I wrote about the last one on this blog). How has it been a whole month already? The topic of this month's event was Estonian and Russian relations, with the provocative title 'Can Estonia become a bi-ethnic success story?'. I had already been told that this can be a tense subject in Estonia. Additionally, with my placement being an integration project, this was right up my street. I really want to get my teeth into this subject and do it justice, so I think I will write a whole new post about it later. To log my hours, I have spent 16 hours at my placement events and classes and 3 hours on work at home since I last posted. This week I am going to write about the article 'Instructional quality of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)' I had read a little about MOOCs for previous modules, mainly on the subject of student motivations (or lack of) to complete courses on MOOCs. I have done a few courses on MOOCs myself. I finished a couple of short Spanish courses on FutureLearn, but the majority of courses I took, I'm ashamed to say, went unfinished. Whether this was due to the quality of the instruction I received or my own motivations, I'm not sure. I'm inclined to say that I did learn a little from the modules I completed, but I simply did not have the incentive to finish the course. Maybe I need some 'push' factors, such as the fact that I invested money in the class (for example, I will always complete short courses that I have paid for), or maybe I need a specific time slot to do the course each week so it becomes part of my routine. This study analysed the instructional quality of 76 MOOCs using the criteria based on 'First Principles of Instruction' by Merrill (2013, cited in Margaryan, Bianco and Littlejohn, 2015). I must admit, I hadn't come across these principles before, and as the authors suggest, it is difficult to find a comprehensive framework to address instructional quality. The study found that most MOOCs achieved a low score on the majority of the principles. I was surprised that 'In 68/76 courses, learning activities did not require learners to relate the course material to their prior knowledge and skills' (Margaryan, Bianco and Littlejohn, 2015, p.80). This is something that is a key principle in English language teaching to activate students' prior knowledge so that they will remember content better and relate to it more deeply. It has become a part of my teaching philosophy, so it was surprising that so many of the courses didn't address this principle. One shortcoming of this study is that it doesn't explore the real experiences of MOOC users. It would be interesting to follow it up with a qualitative study which explores the perceptions of those who took the course to their own learning. The instruction is just one side of what we can see about the quality of the course, and without the learners themselves we can't get the full picture. It is certainly interesting to think deeply about whether MOOCs are providing good quality learning opportunities for students. Perhaps this is part of the reason that I dropped out of the MOOC courses I took, although I was not really conscious of it at the time. I'm not sure, because learning is tiring, I may still have dropped out, for example if I was collaborating more with my peers, I could learn more, but it may take more of my time. Reference:
Yesterday the culture steppers took a trip to the Estonian Theatre and Music Museum! We saw the award winning exhibition 'Songs and Stories', which was a journey through Estonian music, folk stories and theatre. I definitely recommend this exhibition if you are in Tallinn! One Estonian story from the exhibition that caught my attention was called 'The Werewolf'. It was about a mysterious young girl called Tiina who was adopted by a farming family and fell in love with her step-brother Margus. Unfortunately, his other step-sister Mari also has her eye on him, and starts a rumour that Tiina is a werewolf! She ends up running into the forest and living there for a while, and Mari gets to marry the (presumably very handsome) step-brother. The story doesn't really have a happy ending, Margus ends up injuring Tiina, thinking she is a wolf, and she dies in his arms. The exhibition outlined the historical context of the time, highlighting that in the early nineteenth century, many Estonians were living in rural settings like this story took place in. In rural society, strangers tended not to be trusted, and this story can give some insight into the way of life of Estonians in the past. Museums are a great space for informal and non-formal adult learning, and a particular favourite of mine. I appreciate the chance that museums give me to go at my own pace, and to learn through different media; text, images, objects etc. Having the chance to touch and interact with things is really great too, and this exhibition certainly provided that! I also liked that the museum provided chalk boards so that visitors could add responses, which is one way to facilitate some exchange of dialogue in such a space. It was good to see culture step participants and their families interacting with his exhibition! Last week I started my Estonian language classes, which I'm hoping to give the Estonian Institute some feedback on. It has been challenging but interesting so far! Estonian is easier in some ways than other languages I've studied, it's not tonal like Vietnamese, and I can read it unlike my ability with Japanese Kanji. But in some ways the grammar is very difficult for me, I've never encountered a language with so many cases before! It's good to be at least able to say some small things in Estonian now, and it makes me feel more confident doing simple things like going to the supermarket. I will write more about my classes next time. Over the last two weeks for my placement I have completed about 3 hours of work at home, 2 hours on a trip, and 3 hours in Estonian classes. I found this week's reading to be particularly fascinating, and although I didn't know a huge amount on the subject, the article really opened by eyes and changed my perceptions about free online resources. The Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement gives open access to education and information in the form of online resources for learning, teaching or researching. OER are generally found online for free and open to anyone, with many institutions uploading content, gaining recognition from UNESCO. However, Knox (2013) points out that assumptions have been made about OER in its presentation in the media and the academic literature on the subject. He has highlighted five important criticisms of OER.
References Biesta, G. J. (2013). Giving teaching back to education: Responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), 35-49. Knox, J. (2013). Five critiques of the open educational resources movement. Teaching in Higher Education,18(8), 821-832. Todd, S. (2015). The People: The rise and fall of the working class. London: John Murray. We never want to make our students feel 'othered' but this is something that adult educators need to admit can happen in our classes.
This week I am going to write about the article 'Othering in Online Learning' by Phirangee and Malec. This is a qualitative study of six online students and their experiences of feeling like the 'other' in online courses that they were enrolled in. The aim is to consider the underlying reasons why students might experience a sense of isolation in online learning, even when the teacher attempts to build a social presence in the online classroom. The authors highlight that many online students feel isolated, and there are high drop-out rates. Perhaps if we can understand these tendencies, we can begin to think about how we can improve the motivation of students to participate in online learning by facilitating a deeper connection with the content and their peers. The authors categorise three different types of 'other' that were uncovered through their research:
'our participants were othered through work obligations, academic expectations, and ethnic identities that were in misalignment with their peers, their instructors, and the course con- tent.' (Phirangee and Malec, 2017, p.169). Although these students did not actually drop out of their courses, it was a possibility that their feelings may have led them to do so. I thought that this article was an interesting study of online learners and uncovered some reasons for 'othering' that I personally found surprising. As a language teacher, I am already conscious of the possibility for ethnic and linguistic othering in the classroom. For example, if you are teaching a class of multi-lingual students, it is very likely that students will want to group themselves with peers who speak the same language as them. This can lead to othering of those who do not share languages with their classmates, as was the case in the article. I was particularly surprised by the academic othering that was experienced by two of the participants. These students felt that they were othered because they had different academic expectations to their peers. One felt that their classmates were only concerned about getting their own points of view across, while the other felt that the discussions were not challenging enough. They both blamed peers for not creating discussions that they felt were in line with their own academic expectations. I thought this was interesting, as it is quite subjective. I wonder how the other classmates felt about these two participants. Could other people in the class have felt othered too, by those who have higher academic expectations, who might think classmates are 'naval gazing' (Phirangee and Malec, 2017, p.167)? Perhaps one way that this example could be countered would be to give clear guidelines of expectations for interactions in forums. Then it could reduce the instances of students posting content that they think will get them a good mark, but rather responding to one another in a constructive way to build an effective social presence. However, it could go the other way, with more rigid guidelines limiting the creative freedom of online students, and thus still perpetuating possible feelings of isolation. In my personal experience of online learning, I was quite happy with the way that we were given examples of 'good' forum interactions from our tutor. We also got clarifications and feedback from him when we were unsure. Perhaps my class is a unique case, as a 'meta' online learners who are learning about online learning! Students studying other subjects online may not have so much awareness of the academic expectations, which could lead to some learners becoming marginalised in discussions. The authors admit that one limit of this study is that they only interviewed six participants. Morrow (2005, p. 255) has suggested that it is more important in a qualitative study to focus on procedure and depth in the interview than sample size. but perhaps this study is limited in that each category of 'other' only had two interviewees. Perhaps a future study could look at interviewing one particular category, for example people from minority ethnic groups in online contexts. References
This week in our teaching online course, we read about the various roles of adult educators and learners. Since I started this Master's in Adult Education, I have realised that, like many fields, there is a huge variety of language used to refer to almost all aspects of education. It becomes fashionable or unfashionable to use certain words in the literature, for example, are we talking about 'adult education' or 'life-long learning'? Am I a 'teacher', an 'educator', or a 'facilitator of learning' and do I work with 'students' or 'learners'? I am quite often guilty of using these words inter-changeably and it warrants thinking about the use of them more deeply.
This week I read Giving Teaching back to Education by G. Biesta. Biesta is extremely critical of what he sees as the decline of teaching, and increase in what he refers to as the 'language of learning' (Biesta, 2013, p.36). Although he writes this in counter to conservative arguments that the teacher should gain more control and authority. He feels that constructivist perspectives in educational discourse have facilitated a move from the actvities of the teacher to those of the student. The important conclusion from this paper is 'that teachers should teach, that they should be allowed to teach, and that they should have...the courage to teach' (Biesta, 2013, p.45). I agreed with many of Biesta's ideas, particularly with regards to not putting quotas on teachers. Biesta is heavily critical of pedagogies that refer to 'facilitation of learning'. I do agree that a teacher has an important guiding role to play in the classroom. I disagree however, that constructivist changes to the language of learning have "repositioned the teacher from someone who is at the heart of the educational process to one who literally stands at the sideline in order to facilitate the learning of his or her 'learners'" (Biesta, 2013, p.38). I do not think pedagogies that are concerned with learner-centredness really do place the teacher as simply a 'by-stander' in the classroom. In my professional experience, I actually think it is usually more work for the teacher to create learning that is student-centred. Although it may not look like the teacher is standing at the front of the room, with all eyes on them, they are still central in designing the activities that will facilitate learning, deciding the order that they will happen in, designating groups etc. Their voice may not be the loudest at all times in the class, but they are still teaching. He suggests that when we 'learn from' our teachers in this way, that they are 'structurally at the same level as a book' (Biesta, 2013, p.42). I disagree, because a teacher is still human, and not neutral. Even if they choose to use student-centred tasks, or are concerned about their student's learning they can build knowledge together, which we cannot do with a book. I do agree that there are changes being made to curriculums that are sidelining teachers, but I don't see this coming from constructivist paradigms. I do understand that this is part of what Biesta means about letting teachers teach. I think a tightly controlled curriculum or increasing targets for teachers that prevent them from freedom to create the lessons that they want to is certainly a bad thing, but I perceive it as coming from a different place that Biesta suggests. When I first read this article I was quite strongly opposed to much of it, but after a conversation with one of my classmates I went back and reconsidered. I do think it is saying something important for us as adult educators. Perhaps I get frustrated when we spend a long time on semantics. Perhaps because I lean more towards the interpretivist/constructivist paradigm I felt protective. I think balance is important here, Biesta is right, teachers should be allowed to teach, but not at the expense of students learning. In my opinion, teachers and students should learn from and teach one another. The teacher is never side-lined, but I like the thinking of critical pedagogy on this, that we 'must emphasise the collective dimension of of learning and knowledge creation - reading and transforming the world together' (English and Mayo, 2012, p.128). A quote from one of my former teachers! References Biesta, G. J. (2013). Giving teaching back to education: Responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6 (2), 35-49. English, L. and Mayo, P. (2013). Learning with Adults. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Today, I'd like to write about some of my 'online' work with my placement. Alongside going to fascinating events, I've been doing work behind the scenes too. As well as some proofreading and formatting for the Culture Step programme and emails, I helped to set up the facebook group (it's private unfortunately, just for participants!). Actually, I was surprised at how useful a tool this was in bringing people together. I have also been sharing some of my blog posts on this site for public reading. My post about the Estonishing Evenings event was even shared by the online publication Estonian World! This was a personal challenge for me, because I am not used to offering my reflective writing to a public readership. I feel insecure about what people might think about writing that is quite personal, but I want to challenge myself more, and I am already learning a lot from this process. I'm hoping I can learn more by opening myself up to the opinions of others. Thinking about this also gave me an idea for something new I can work with for culture step. I want to create a new blog that is not just my own, but that participants can submit entries to, whether it be written, images, music, film, etc. This is something I'm going to work on over the next week. It is great that Lea is very open to these ideas and allows me to work so independently! I like this style of working in Estonia, I love to be given so much freedom to work on projects! I have a complicated relationship with social media. I often feel anxious about posting my views on Facebook, and recently have used it very little. My mental health is notably improved when I minimise use of social media. However, I've realised that for me, social media is a necessary evil. Estonia is the fifth country that I've lived in (sixth if you could England and Scotland separately), I have friends and family all over the world. Facebook is the easiest way to keep in touch with those people. I can use it to 'drop in' on people who I might be crossing paths with soon. Apparently I should be posting my hours spent at placement. According to my Culture Step passport, which logs our hours spent at events through stickers, I have so far spent 18 hours at events. (Estonishing evenings, towers tour, launch and nature film, architecture museum, Lahemaa National park trip) I have also spent at least 10 hours working on my own time on proof-reading, online content development, writing this blog, etc. At the start of this project, Lea said she thought I would be spending more than my 60 hours, this will probably be the case, with more events this week and the Estonian language class! But I don't mind, even though I'm doing a lot, it's very fun too! This has been an exciting week for the organisers and participants of the Culture Step programme! I am in an interesting position, because I am helping to organise and arrange things but also getting to participate. If you're also a participant and reading this blog, I'd love to know some of your thoughts about your experience in the comments. This week we have had two events so far, and we'll have two more by the end of the week. First, we took a trip to the four ancient towers that form part of Kiek in de Kök Fortifications Museum. We met at Neitsitorn Tower (which dates back to 1370) and took a walk through the four towers that make up the museum. Kiek in de Kök is apparently the largest medieval tower in the Baltic countries. There are all sorts of ghost stories surrounding the fortifications, which reminded me of my hometown Norwich, which is also a medieval city like Tallinn, with plenty of spooky stories. Our guide, Kadi, had done some academic research into this subject, and she suggested that wherever you go in the world, people tell ghost stories! This certainly fits with my experiences of other cultures and I was reminded of a taxi driver in Singapore who spent twenty minutes warning me about the women with no legs he saw gliding around the modern city at night. When we are newcomers to a culture, it's comforting to see some familiarities (even spooky ones). Does this match with your own culture or cross-cultural encounters? Last night we had our official Culture Step launch party. We tried some traditional Estonian snacks and watched a new nature documentary called The Wind Sculpted Land. The movie has just won 'best cinematography' at Matsalu international film festival and shows the changing seasons across Estonia, documenting how this affects the wildlife's behaviour. I can see why it deserved the award, because each shot is a beautiful view of nature, some from traditional angles we are used to seeing, others providing a fresh perspective that frame the natural world like a beautiful painting. Some of the animals are familiar to me, we have foxes (rebane) and otters (sa oled) in England. But we do not have wolves (hunt), or moose (libu). Many Estonian people that I meet seem to have a deep connection with nature, with wild swimming and mushrooming trips to the forest a regular weekend activity for many. On my Estonian language apps, I was taught phrases like 'I'm going hiking in Lahemaa with my family' - 'Lähen perega Lahemaale matkama' and the word for mushrooming (seenele) very early on! Watching this film made me think about how nature can influence culture and the two can become entangled with one another. The land that we are brought up in can greatly impact the way that we view the world. Having a connection with nature changes the way that we go about our daily lives. Likewise, we impact nature, by filming it, taking walks within it, consuming (even man made things). The changing seasons here also have a big impact on how people act. Having lived in cities that do not have four seasons (Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Singapore), I can say that although winter can be sad, it means that we appreciate the warm weather of summer much more! People in those countries had not based their cultural events so much around the changing seasons, although in the case of Vietnam, and some Chinese Singaporeans, they focussed on the moon instead. Cyclical change that can be represented by the seasons or the moon is a big part of our lives, that sometimes we're more conscious of than others. Time is passing, but with the seasons it is moving in a circle, rather than a straight line. It's sad that summer is ending, but it has to if we are going to see the beautiful colours of autumn again. Actually we saw in the film that Estonia even has a fifth season, a natural flood that comes between winter and spring. We often perceive floods to be a disaster, but here it is a crucial part of the natural cycle. You can watch the trailer here. Finally, I want to think about how watching a nature documentary relates to adult education. Sitting down to watch a documentary (or any movie for that matter) is an example of informal learning that we are doing all the time. I learned a lot from this film, not only about Estonian wildlife, but also Estonian perspectives on nature. The Culture Step programme is providing different kinds of learning opportunities for participants than they may usually find in the formal space of a classroom, or in their workplace. The process of learning about Estonian culture is also opening up questions for me about my own culture, and what I might want to share with migrants about British culture (I don't want to get into that now though because I think it's a very different situation!). I hope to find out more about the cultures of the other participants too, perhaps bringing this multi-cultural dimension can be one of the ways I can help add further to the project as part of my placement. This week I read about some different learning theories. Some were familiar to me, such as behaviourism and social contructivism, but one was new, that of connectivism. What's connectivism? Connectivism is an attempt to come up with a learning theory for a digital age, with many learning theories developed before we had access to online learning tools. It has some key points:
Some of the principles reminded me of Vella's discussion of quantum thinking:'It is a shock for most of us to consider a universe composed of energy that is patterned and spontaneous, the certainty of uncertainty, “both/and” thinking, and the connectedness of everything.' (Vella, 2002, p.29) Digital storytelling This week we had the opportunity to work in a group to make a piece of digital content to discuss a learning theory that we chose. I worked with my classmate Mari to make a 'digital storybook' that helped to explain some of the theories in an accessible way. We used the website Storybird to create a picture book. This site provides access to illustrations by fantastic artists and the ability to easily construct a book that can be shared online. We chose an artist called Oya, who is a German and Turkish illustrator. If you'd like to see more of her art, you can find her profile on storybird here. I found this process to be fun and informative. There is a challenge involved by making an academic topic into a story book, because information has to be consolidated and written in a simple way. We also experimented with using dialogue between our two characters to give a sense of the real-life dialogue that we had around the subject. We also wanted to pose the reader some questions, which we did in a playful way at the end of the story. I like this format because I don't believe adult learning always has to be serious, and it's nice to have some fun while you learn! The platform of Storybird might not work for everyone, and it was a little limiting in that the user has to stick to only one set of pictures, and you do not get much choice in fonts or have the chance to use any other creative styles (animations, hyperlinks etc.). But as a traditional story-telling format it works well, and the selection of art is great. You can find our story here. References
Bell, F. (2011). Connectivism: Its place in theory-informed research and innovation in technology-enabled learning. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(3), 98-118. Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3-10. Vella, J., (2002). Learning to listen, learning to teach: the power of dialogue in educating adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Last night I went to 'How to make Tallinn great again?', which was the first event on the culture step programme! It was an event organised by Estonishing Evenings, and there were local Estonians and people from all over the world, from Iran to Germany to the USA! This series has the aim of bringing Estonians together with those from other countries living in Estonia, to discuss local issues and share opinions and viewpoints with one another. The theme of this month's event was on how to improve Tallinn, through city planning on a government level and also what local people can do. There were talks by local speakers, and the opportunity to discuss in groups and share ideas. The facilitator in my group had brought lots of post-its to collect different people's thoughts. The venue was a place called Erinevate Tubade Klubi or 'the club of different rooms' in English, located in Telliskivi, Tallinn's exciting 'Creative city'. This room somehow manages to combine a comfortable, homely atmosphere with state of the art technology. When you arrive, you can remove your shoes and put on slippers, and there are comfortable sofas and chairs around tables. This is combined with screens throughout, and a green-screen stage. I felt like it was a really relaxed atmosphere, especially because high-tech venues are usually brightly lit and often feel uncomfortable to me. This space nurtured an informal environment for discussion and sharing ideas and enabled everyone to have a good view of the stage. Later in the evening, we had a talk from the founder and CEO of Telliskivi, Jaanus Juss. He shared some of the aims that he had in creating the spaces, and how they developed and built a successful artistic community. During the Soviet times, the buildings that now make up Telliskivi were railway warehouses and factories. They stood disused for many years, until they were bought by Jaanus and his partners. They rent the spaces primarily to creative enterprises, sometimes allowing in something more commercial to subsidise lower rents for artistic spaces. He attributes some of Telliskivi's success to the fact that they haven't accepted grants from outside investors, either from the private sector or any governments or the EU. He sees this as key to maintaining creative control over decision-making, that they do not have to answer to investors, and thus do not have to choose the biggest profits over the 'best fit' to the community. The city hosts practice spaces for bands, music venues, theatre, art galleries and much more, as well as many cool bars and restaurants. According to their website, they have nearly one million people going to events here each year. Having been involved myself with creative communities in the past, it is a truly impressive achievement, because I know there are huge physical, economic and bureaucratic hurdles to overcome. There are perhaps some compromises that have to be made in an endeavour like this, in terms of corporate events. Personally, I'm more in favour of a shared ownership model, and not totally averse to local government funding. One worry I have is that governments could use a success story like Telliskivi as an excuse not to fund culture, and leave it entirely up to free-market forces. Also, most decisions are made by Juss and his team, so the city relies on their taste and view points. I wonder what would happen if they opened up creative decisions to the wider community of people who go to Telliskivi? Could it be more democratic? I want to look more into how this creative city is benefitting the local community, but it does seem like a good example of how creativity can thrive given the right nurturing. I also think another key to its success is local knowledge. It was created by people who knew the area and were able to think about ways that they could improve it themselves. Juss stands in stark contrast to corporations and outside investors who know nothing about a locality and its needs. If you are reading this and you know something about Telliskivi, or I got something wrong, please leave your ideas in the comments! This event is a great example of adult learning that can be bottom up, and be beneficial for participants and wider society. These Estonishing Evening events have made a start in creating a dialogue and building communication between wider sections of the community living in Estonia. I hope that the team will continue to run and build upon these fantastic, collaborative events and I hope that more like it will spring up.
Last week I read about seamless learning. I had never heard of this kind of learning before, but it does combine learning theories that I am aware of.
What does 'Seamless' mean? The word 'seamless' implies learning that blends together and is smooth and without transition. This is part of seamless learning, and essentially it can be a combination of different learning, whether it be formal or informal that comes together to create a holistic, life-wide process for the learner. Technology plays a big part in the literature on seamless learning, with mobile and online learning facilitating learning, both inside and out of the classroom. This technology is how the learning can happen at any time, with smart phones allowing us to learn in a flexible way. Is it Blended Learning? At first I wondered, how is seamless learning different from blended learning? Particularly in English language teaching, blended learning is when formal educators use online resources to supplement classroom learning at home and thus combines face-to-face learning with technology (Hockley, 2018). It seems that seamless learning even goes beyond this. Although some of the literature suggests that it would still be linked to the formal classroom, seamless learning is not necessarily set by the teacher, and could involve learning that is more student-centred (Wong et al., 2015). My own experience of seamless learning Seamless learning, by its definition is happening all the time, across different contexts (Looi et al., 2012). It is even happening now, as I write this blog, which is a part of the learning process of an online class that I am taking. I read the materials assigned by the teacher. Next I posted some ideas and read my classmates ideas on a forum, I did a little of my own further research and then started writing this blog (while looking back at the reading and class discussions). And while we have new topics every week, I have found myself looking back at the older discussions and framing them in light of my new knowledge. It seeps into the other modules that I do, as my learning in an online environment reframes my perceptions of face to face discussions. If you, my readers leave a comment, we can even continue to build on this process through discussion of these ideas. Criticism My personal reservation, and one that cropped up from other classmates on the forum, about seamless learning, is that it works best when technology is involved, and is therefore exclusive. Although I think it could happen 'offline', certainly potential students of this course who did not have access to the internet would not be able to participate in the seamless learning that I have so far in this module. Perhaps because I have taught in contexts with poor internet access, I am wary about assuming that all learners have smart phones. References Hockly, N. (2018). Blended Learning. ELT Journal, 72(1), 97-101. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccx058 Looi, C. K., So, H. J., Chen, W., Zhang, B., Wong, L. H., & Seow, P. (2012). Seamless learning. In Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 2975-2979). Springer. Wong, L. H., Milrad, M., & Specht, M. (Eds.). (2015). Seamless learning in the age of mobile connectivity. Singapore: Springer. Last week marked the start of our IMAESC module in teaching adult education online. We had some interesting materials, online discussion and 'met' our tutor through web-conferencing software. I'm definitely looking forward to this module.
I just got home from my first meeting with Lea, the English language organiser of the Culture Step project with the Estonian Institute. I am now even more excited about the time I will spend there!
Lea explained that there are many people living in Estonia who do not speak the language or know much about the culture. A large proportion of these people are Russians, who moved here from the Soviet Union. There are also many people from other countries who mostly moved here for jobs. The culture step programme has funding for 250 people to be able to take part in language classes, events and trips to help them to integrate and learn more about Estonian culture. They have had a massive amount of interest from people wanting to participate, which is fantastic! It looks like I will be able to help them in many ways. I will go to Estonian language classes and offer my perspectives as a language teacher, help out with some trips and events in Tallinn and around the country and do some content writing and proofreading for them. This is really great, because as well as learning a lot about Estonian culture, I hope that this means I can contribute something useful to this organisation. This is an area of adult education that I'm particularly interested in so I'm very excited to be able to be involved with these events and to see how they unfold. Lea gave me lots of resources, so I have been doing my own learning about Estonian culture. Did you know that Estonia is a 'singing nation' and had a 'singing revolution' during the 1980s to demand independence from Russia? Estonians gathered peacefully and sang patriotic songs. It goes to show that there is a huge variety of ways to instigate social change, and singing is one of them! I'd better start practicing my Estonian language skills too... Nägemist! This is a bit of a test to see if I can have a blog for two subjects at once here!
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LaurenI am an IMAESC student, English teacher and adult education researcher from the UK. Categories
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