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[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

I can’t believe the first term is about to end, with so much that I have yet to reflect on.

However, I can quickly share the subject overview and description for the Curriculum Information for Lower Seniors booklet (see below or download as a PDF):

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Thanks, Elizabeth.

I was delighted that we were joined by Ruth Maloney* for Episode 16 of FOSIL, Education and School Libraries.

*Co-host with Elizabeth of Engaging and Empowering School Libraries.

 

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

For 12 November 2024, Jenny prepared a department-based INSET titled, Responsible Use of AI.

The session was guided through a video (YouTube link 17m45s) to facilitate discussion, and departments fed back using the accompanying handout (PDF download).

The accompanying PowerPoint contains all of the links referred to in the video (PPT download).

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Also, I have just shared the following with our Sixth Form students following their Interrobang!? presentations, which, this year, took AI as their starting point …

Carl T. Bergstrom, Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, and Jevin D. West, Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, offer a 3-credit, graded course titled, Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World. They have also published a book titled, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.

Shahan Ali Memon is a PhD student and a teaching assistant in their Calling Bullshit course.

Of Shahan, Carl says: “He’s a great follow if you care about our information ecosystem. I am blown away by the level of introspection that Shahan exhibits with respect to lecturing in our course. I wish I’d been so thoughtful 30 year ago.”

Shahan recently had the opportunity to give a guest lecture on “automating bullshit” as part of the course.

The slides for his lecture – Automating Bullshit – can be viewed/ downloaded here, and is deeply thoughtful about AI.

In referencing Safiya Umoja Noble‘s book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, he quotes Abeba Birhane and Vinay Uday Prabhu (2021), authors of the paper, Large image datasets: A pyrrhic win for computer vision?:

“Feeding AI systems on the world’s beauty, ugliness, and cruelty, but expecting it to reflect only the beauty is a fantasy.”

And as Dallas Willard says, crooked thinking, however well-intentioned, always favours evil.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Sorry, Elizabeth, I missed your posts here, so have copied across my replies from LinkedIn.

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I have added our latests podcast (see above), with further thoughts on the problem of how what a school does, particularly in the classroom, combines to actually achieve what a school claims to aim to do. In conclusion, it is “increasingly clear that inquiry – properly understood and supported – enables the classroom both to achieve its aims in terms of acquiring knowledge and contribute directly to the school achieving its aims in terms of developing a certain type of person.

I am familiar with the Trivium & Quadrivium in the context of a classical liberal education: Trivium being grammar, logic, & rhetoric; Quadrivium being arithmetic, astronomy, music, & geometry. In this sense, they are subjects/disciplines. On some level, the content of the Trivium is relevant to the inquiry process, e.g., rhetoric in Express. Maritain, who we discussed on Saturday, makes a compelling and more helpful case for a contemporary liberal education (1967!), which “drastically revises the classical and medieval seven liberal arts, the Trivium and the Quadrivium, in order to provide for the vast development of knowledge [and the technological environment and means for producing it] in recent times and at the same time preserve the liberal character of education…On the level of universal knowledge…the liberal arts must be reintegrated so as to comprehend, as they once did, the physical sciences, the human sciences, the literary disciplines, and philosophy. The physical sciences, and others patterned upon them, must regain their humanistic character.” (pp. 17-18)

Maritain describes a contemporary liberal education as “fully human education…preparing the youth to exercise their power to think in a genuinely free and liberating manner—that is to say…it equips them for truth and makes them capable of judging according to the worth of evidence, of enjoying truth and beauty for their own sake, and of advancing, when they have become adults, toward wisdom and some understanding of those things which bring to them intimations of immortality” (1952, p. 3). The process of coming to know and understand reality on the strength of evidence is inquiry, which is why inquiry is a distinguishing feature of a contemporary liberal education. Maritain terms this freedom terminal freedom —“the fulfillment of the deepest potentialities of the human being in the world” (1967, p. 10), which is reflected in the portraits of an engaged and empowered inquirer (below – download as PNG image) and in my post above).

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Episode 15 (and Episode 14) now available.

One of the things Elizabeth and I touch on is the problem of how what a school does, particularly in the classroom, combines to actually achieve what a school claims to aim to do.

Inquiry has as its end engaged and empowered inquirers, the attributes of whom are developed systematically and progressively through inquiry (see below), which is directed at acquiring disciplinary knowledge in an interdisciplinary way. These attributes, therefore, describe the emergence of a certain type of learner – a Heroic Inquirer in the terms of our work on aligning the stages of the information-to-knowledge learning journey (see, for example, the IFLA School Library Guidelines) with the hero’s life journey (see, for example, The Hero with a Thousand Faces). An exciting focus of our recent work at Blanchelande is mapping the attributes of a Heroic Inquirer to the type of character that a Blanchelande education aims to develop, which makes it increasingly clear that inquiry – properly understood and supported – enables the classroom both to achieve its aims in terms of acquiring knowledge and contribute directly to the school achieving its aims in terms of developing a certain type of person.

It is worth reflecting on this from the perspective of Jacques Maritain’s profound observation: “Nothing is more important than the events which occur within that invisible universe which is the mind of [a person]. And the light of that universe is knowledge. If we are concerned with the future of civilization we must be concerned primarily with a genuine understanding of what knowledge is, its value, its degrees, and how it can foster the inner unity of the human being.” (The Range of Reason, 1952, p. 3)

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Volume 71, Number 4, Winter 2023 above was the last in this series of Between the Library and the Classroom: Becoming Integral to the Educational Process for The School Librarian, the Quarterly Journal of the School Library Association.

However, starting with Between the Library and the Classroom: Becoming Integral to the Educational Process 2.1 below, I continue this series for the School Library Association Blog.

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Between the Library and the Classroom: Becoming Integral to the Educational Process 2.1

“Of all the ‘survival strategies’ education has to offer, none is more potent or in greater need of explication than the ‘inquiry environment'” (Postman & Weingartner, 1969, p. 36).

An educational inquiry environment is potent because and to the extent that it develops engaged and empowered inquirers. This is because inquiry is how we, individually and collectively, acquire the knowledge and understanding necessary to deal successfully with reality, which, in the final analysis, is the only true measure of human success.

Our collective failure to deal successfully with reality is painfully and alarmingly evident, as even a glance at any day’s news headlines will confirm, which is a consequence of our failure to establish an effectual inquiry environment in school.

However, the school library is by its very nature an inquiry environment, and it is, therefore, both a vital enabler and driver of inquiry within school. This makes the school library integral to the education process of school, properly understood. This also, then, positions the school librarian(s) on the frontline of the struggle to shape the answer to, as John Dewey (1956) puts it, the “fundamental … question of what anything whatsoever must be to be worthy of the name of education” (p. 17).

The future of school libraries, and that of our children, hinges on the shape of the answer to this question.

Now, the potency of any given school library will depend on the extent to which it is true to its nature, which is not solely and/ or fully under the control of its librarian(s). This is because any given school will itself only ever be a more or less vital and enabling inquiry environment. This is a complex situation that exists between the library and the classroom, and one that requires explication, still. And this brings us to the purpose of this series of blog posts, which is an online continuation of my defunct TSL column of the same name (plus 2.n), the articles of which have been collated in the FOSIL Group forum, A theory of the role of the library in the student’s intellectual experience.

I will continue this work of explication every 2 months, with the next post developing the argument outlined here more practically. However, as the eventual shape of the answer to the question of what is worthy of the name of education and its outworking for our profession will emerge out of professional conversation, I will in the meantime, as time permits, join in the conversation here.

The revolution will not be televised.

References

• Dewey, J. (1956). Experience and Education: Selections. In Great Issues in Education (Vol. II, pp. 3-17). Chicago, IL: The Great Books Foundation.
• Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.

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The FOSIL Group is an international community of library- and classroom-based educators committed to building an effectual inquiry environment in primary-secondary / PK-12 education.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

After some illness and recuperation, Episode 13 of FOSIL, Education and School Libraries, in which we look ahead to some exciting developments in the coming academic year.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

I have been poor at updating this topic, which I apologise for.

Elizabeth Hutchinson has moved the podcast collection onto its own platform, which will make it easier to link to: FOSIL, Education and School Libraries.

Since the previous post, we have discussed the history of UK school libraries from 1986 to 2024 (27 April), and reflected on a year of discussions (27 May).

Our next discussion is planned for 6 July, when we will be looking ahead to some very exciting developments.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

A quick update.

The Year 9 Signature Work Inquiry leads to the GCSE English Language speaking and listening Non-Examined Assessment. Students are currently presenting their 5-minute speech, which is followed by a 5-minute Q&A, and I am very pleased with the quality of their work.

I am also delighted that FOSIL Signature Work Inquiry will be a timetabled subject for Year 9 next year, with an allocation of 1 lesson and 1 homework a week, which I will teach. This will allow me to develop this inquiry even more purposefully.

Meaningful curricular links with English and Geography (sustainable development) remain, and I am developing a meaningful curricular link with Theology in terms of Catholic Social Teaching.

I have produced a brief overview of the inquiry below:

I am now working on a subject overview and description for the Curriculum Information for Lower Seniors booklet, which I will share when done.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

A lot has happened since I started this topic.

Firstly, the lesson to relate the field trip to the process of Heroic Inquiry (click on image to enlarge).

In preparing for this lesson, I came across the following map of Herm (click on image to enlarge), which provided us with a focus for our field trip/ heroic inquiry.

Secondly, the field trip itself, which coincided with ideal weather conditions (which proved significant to our inquiry). We developed the following questionnaire (click on image to enlarge), and we were able to interview a wide range of exceedingly friendly and helpful Herm Island staff (8) and visitors (8). I was deeply impressed by how inquisitive the pupils were and how keen they were to document their experiences on the field trip, in both writing and drawing – I will share samples of this later.

Thirdly, the lesson following the field trip. I created a chronological presentation of the field trip, which included a word cloud of responses to our questionnaire (click on image to enlarge) – note that I did not separate residents from visitors.

I was very pleased that we are able to use another map that found to calculate that we had walked about 2 miles during our field trip (click on image to enlarge).

We are going to produce a field guide to Herm for the next cohort of heroic inquirers to use and develop further, and pupils will each capture a personal highlight of their field trip in a drawing accompanied by a written reflection (click on image to enlarge), which will help shape next year’s field trip.

I will update on progress towards the field guide in due course.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Students have now finished drafting their essay and are working with their English teachers to develop their essay into a speech. I missed the first of these lessons last week due to the Year 2 (Grade 1) Signature Work Inquiry field trip to Herm Island, but will reflect on this aspect in due course.

In ICT this week, students produced their poster for our Year 9 Signature Work Inquiry Celebration on 20 June (click on image to enlarge).

With the introduction of the essay into the Signature Work this year, it occurred to me that the poster, which I developed last year, also serves quite well as an introduction to the idea of an abstract. I will explore this more deliberately next year.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Students are drafting their essays and I am deeply impressed by the quality of their work (click on image to enlarge), especially considering that more broadly we are working to centre education in the learning process, rather than in the teaching process, encourage initiative and independence on the part of students, and bring students to grips with original thought as expressed in books and other media.

Edit: I will develop this further, but I should add that this is a sure way to develop academic integrity and to be sure of academic integrity. Furthermore, read what these students have written, or, better yet, discuss it with them, and you will be in no doubt about how much they have learnt for themselves, and how deeply they have learnt it.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

To develop the idea of learning through writing further, Gordon Wells (2001)* continues:

The processes of thinking, such as categorizing, hypothesizing, reasoning, and evaluating, are not only realized in language, in the sense of being made manifest in speech and writing, but also actually constructed and improved through its mediating means. … The mediating role of dialogue in knowledge-building is probably most evident in face-to-face discussion. … Knowledge-building also takes place in the written mode … the writer engages in dual dialogue: with the audience to whom the text is addressed and with himself through dialogue with the emerging text. By the same token, reading another’s text also needs to be undertaken dialgogically. … Equally important, it is through the same sort of collaborative knowledge-building that each of us develops understanding of what other people have already come to know, as this is represented in texts and other knowledge objects. (pp. 184, 186-187)

Following on from the essay flowchart and essay plan graphic organiser above, I developed the essay draft graphic organiser and essay exemplar below (click on images to enlarge):

*Wells, G. (2001). The Case for Dialogic Inquiry. In G. Wells (Ed.), Action, Talk & Text: Learning and Teaching Through Inquiry (pp. 171-194). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

For various reasons, some of which relate to timetabling, it was not possible to start working directly on the speeches at the start of this term (3a below). However, this did allow me to re-think the function of the 1,500-word written Extended Elevator Pitch at the end of last term (2b below), which was meant to lay the foundation for students to build their speeches on. Consequently, I moved the re-thought 1,500-word written piece from Term 2b to Term 3a, which I will explain further, although it still serves to lay a foundation, and a more solid one at that, for the students to build their speeches on, as well as prepare themselves for the subsequent Q&A session.

I have been reflecting on the following thoughts about the theme of learning through writing from The Development of a Community of Inquirers in Action, Talk & Text: Learning & Teaching Through Inquiry (Wells, 2001, emphasis added)*:

Linda: I conjectured that perhaps if writing is used as a tool for what I call ‘rehearsal thinking,’ would our oral discourse be one in which more will participate as well as [be] more substantive? … So I decided to use writing as a tool for individual thinking before embarking on a class discussion. … The consequences were amazing. First the pool of ideas surprised me. … It also provided the less confident…a chance to ‘see their own thinking’ & therefore feel more confident in being able to ‘read out their thoughts’ rather than having to respond not only spontaneously but also at the turn-taking speed of oral discourse. Another is that writing slowed down one’s thinking, making it more deliberate & intentional allowing one the ‘space’ to be more thoughtful, making one’s thinking visible for review & changes. Very significantly, writing provided everyone a ‘same-time’ turn & therefore increased dramatically the pool of knowledge which linear turn-taking in oral discourse does not. (pp. 12-13)

Gordon: [The resulting plan] indicated a focus on writing, not as a finished product, but as a tool to be used in some subordinate activity. It also indicated an expectation that action and talk would be intimately connected to the written text. (p. 13)

This led me to re-think the Extended Elevator Pitch, which was really a very loosely structured script for the speech, as an essay, but an essay as a tool for building knowledge and understanding rather than as an ‘assessment’ of knowledge and understanding. Because the English speech and Q&A is integral to the Signature Work, the fact that the Signature Work is an inquiry-based exploration of a significant issue, problem or question made a persuasive/ opinion or argumentative/ position essay most appropriate.

This aligns well with the FOSIL priority skills for Construct and Express:

It took me some time to think my way through the essay writing process, which resulted in the following essay flowchart and graphic organiser, which I have just given to the students:

This development has raised some important questions, which I will reflect on in due course.

*Wells, G. (2001). The Development of a Community of Inquiry. In G. Wells (Ed.), Action, Talk & Text: Learning and Teaching Through Inquiry (pp. 1-22). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

On 13 April 2024, Elizabeth Hutchinson and I met for the 10th in our ongoing monthly discussion about education, school libraries and FOSIL-based inquiry.

This week we discussed the history of UK school libraries from 1937 to 1986, although this history does not unfold in isolation from developments elsewhere.

Listen to this episode here, and listen to the rest of the series here.

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