Juxtaposition

Don’t you think that’s an awesome word?

Even just as a word even without considering its meaning!

Juxta position, Jux ta pos i tion, Juxtaposition.

I first came across the word in an educational sense when I was introduced to Jamie McKenzie, as an ICT Guru, in 1996. This was before we had the glorious disaster of Netday in our school, before one could get on the net and chat to a journalist in Israel and a writer in New York about what they had for dinner, before we could send each other fascinating and silly wriggling emails and share a laugh in our separate but similar four-walled rats cages!

Juxtaposition in the educational sense according to Jamie, was putting two things next to each other which would then trigger a different way of thinking about the two things, or shock us into recognition of the significance of the juxtaposition.

Bing Bam Bash

Presenter M Guhlin from California showed us lots of exciting ideas and things kids are into on the net, with the point of view that if they’re doing this stuff on their own, we should be bringing it into the classroom.

I agree with that.

The classroom should at LEAST be able to engage children at the technological level they are already capable of, and where possible, of course, extend that.

However, what I struggled with is the BING BAM BASH thing. That’s where the kids do things like bring together different movie clips to create something different. One example that we were shown had space ships all shooting at each other.

When I  think about what actual critical or explicit learning the children are doing here, I think, hmmmm processing…. umm processing….yup…. processing.

I’m all for processing.

But what I’m actually for is the critical thinking behind the processing. The thinking that says, “I’m trying to show people what I think about this….it’s this person I’m trying to convince, I think they’ll get the idea best if I…… and what about if I include a shot of this….then they’ll know THIS important point that I want to make. And if I put a lot of quick shots of this in then they’ll feel………” To me, that’s a totally different thing than bringing together a BING and a BANG and a BASH to make some exciting movie special FX.

Things that wriggle and jiggle and go BIM BAM BASH are all fun and exciting, and a sure-fire way to pull some kids in, who might be hard to motivate otherwise, but let’s make sure that there is some real and explicit learning going on as well!

Welcome Green Bay Bloggers!

Green Bay School uses an Inquiry Learning Pedagogy called Learning Pathways.

Learning Pathways aims to create independent, motivated, skilled learners with well developed critical thinking skills.

The sequence we use at Green Bay initiates with the staff deciding on the context and a Fertile Question, which will be worked on for a whole term. This is followed by  an Immersion phase, because we believe that the students need some knowledge before they begin to form questions. When the immersion phase is complete, the students form sub-questions which will enable them to answer “The Big Question” and proceed to investigate and discover answers to their questions. Whilst the school is currently loosely following Gwen Gawith’s “Action Learning” as this is an Information Literacy Model that is familiar to many NZ teachers, staff are free to use whichever IL Model they feel best suits the needs of their children.

Term 2, 2007, our big question is: Push, Play, Why bother?

Push, Play refers to a SPARC programme which encourages people to participate in at least 30 minutes exercise a day.