Dangerous
Ideas will be discussed by Guðrún Pétursdóttir from Iceland and Cherry Hopton around the
Metaphysics of Teaching – the unquantifiable motivator of friendship and
respect’
It is often proposed that adherents of
‘target culture’ know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. We propose that one of the key elements of
teaching and learning is that which cannot be counted or measured empirically –
the magical element of how relationships, respect, motivation can collide and
improve the experience and efforts of both teacher and learner – and teacher as
learner.
Using our own friendship as a template
we will discuss how important it is to find like minded others to act as
sounding board, support, fellow enthusiast and how the wider community of
educationalists may provide such relationships.
The work that can grow from such
partnerships is greater than the sum of its parts. Tending to an idea or a project ceases to be
work. How can we grow such relationships
within a culture that is focussed on targets, products and the production of
evidence and how do we convince our organisational leaders to pay attention to
the relationships between people in as much detail as they attend to the
relationships between MIS systems.
Cherry
and Gudrun first met 9 years ago when Cherry attended and ICI course on Co
Operative Learning. Since then they have
worked on a range of projects and courses, shared ideas, exchanged friends and
family members, travelled but most of all spoken about students, teaching and
learning. Cherry’s students are now all
Icelandophile’s and Gudrun’s trainees watch Cherry’s students in action on
film. When in doubt we skype, email,
text, phone or visit!
One of the key aims of our teaching is
to explore the ideas of interculturalism – the proposition that it is interest,
empathy, commonality of ideologies not ethnic background that binds us. Historically we have been encouraged to view
people outside our own ‘group’ as ‘other’ – even when attempts are made to
acknowledge other groups it is often via ‘cultural events’ -
which often rely on stereotypes.......’Here are some Mexican students –
look at their ponchos’. Our experience
and belief is that you are equally likely to find people on the same page as
you outside your ‘group’ and the diversity of experience is a benefit rather
than a problem.
The
principle of human connections which cannot be meaningfully quantified is
equally applied to students/students and students/teachers.
Key ideas:
·
Co
operative learning
·
Diversity
as benefit
·
Inter
culturalism
·
Human
relationships
·
Critique
of target culture
Cherry Hopton has been course leader for social
science at Dundee and Angus College for 12 years. She has lectured in
Social Sciences for around 20 years in various locations including New College
Nottingham, Leeds University and South East Essex College. For the
past 8 years she has been working closely with Gudrun Petirsdottir of
Intercultural Iceland in the area of Co operative Learning and various
educational research projects in addition to her role at D and A. Cherry
has provided training in co operative learning in Iceland, Belgium, Greece and
the UK. Co operative learning by its nature leads to creative and diverse
outcomes or products hence her involvement with creative learning projects and
diverse assessment methods.’ Ask her
what her dangerous ideas are for education!
Guðrún Pétursdóttir finished Master degree in sociology from the Freie
Universität Berlin in year 1990. Beside
sociology she also studied intercultural education at the Institut für
interkulturelle Erziehung at the same university and later finished the teacher’s
qualification at the University of Iceland. For the last 15 years Guðrún has worked in
different fields connected with migration issues and teachers training and has
since 2003 ran the intercultural centre InterCultural Iceland (www.ici.is).
She
taught courses at the Teachers University during the years 2003-2005 and at the
pedagogical department of the University of Iceland from 2006-2009. She has run Grundtvig/Comenius In-service
training courses for teachers and educators since 2004, developed cooperative
teaching methods and materials and she is the author of two books: Intercultural
education (1999) and Everyone can do something nobody can do everything;
a practical handbook for teachers (2003).
