#ed5300

The third post of three in an attempt to uncover deeply held assumptions that have shaped my academic trajectory through higher education. In the first post of this series I covered my formative undergraduate years, and then my growing understanding of the the place of learning in my life as I finished my undergraduate.

As prepared to graduate my application of knowledge to produce novel solutions led to work with multimedia and the burgeoning web. Soon after I left University I was working in a youth multimedia centre, conducting introductory courses to the internet and training first generation web developers.

That work led me to an international career in multimedia and the web that spanned 8 years, first working for a Cooperative Multimedia Centre. During that time I was being head hunted to train for the education arm of QANTM CMC but I went with passion of developing, perhaps because I thought I could learn more from it.

That knowledge comes first hand through exploration and self-examination has been a guiding assumption in my career. It probably steered me away from becoming a teacher in the stereotypical sense of a person standing in front of a blackboard in front of class of 30 kids. That style of teaching never had much to offer me, and I always felt that I had more to learn.

When the steam ran out of my web career in the early noughties I tried a few different things, from working in the gym again to teaching yoga but realised that I still had a lot to learn about my place in the world. I decided that I wanted to learn Japanese so I took the opportunity to become an English language instructor in Japan. The other goal was to earn my black belt in a second martial art, having earned one as a teenager in karate.

I came back from Japan five years later, fluent in Japanese, but also well versed in language teaching techniques. I very quickly turned that around into a business teaching people Japanese over the internet via video conferencing software. I strengthened my teaching qualifications with a CELTA and went looking for more reliable income. I was teaching English part time when I found a job as a Learning and Support officer at James Cook University Brisbane.

I realise now that to advance my career in education I need to learn how to bring all of my life and work experience into one cohesive whole that that can bring value to a learning organisation and more importantly, learners. I feel that I have the chance to do that here at James Cook University and I really appreciate the opportunity to take part in this subject ED5300 Learning and Teaching in Higher Education as part of the Graduate Certificate of Tertiary Teaching. I am also concurrently admitted to a Graduate Certificate in eLearning through the University of New England. Hopefully I can bring both those qualifications together under a Masters of Education in the near future.

As part of my second assignment for ED5300 I need to analyse an interview with a colleague. I've teamed up with Gregory Trotman - Senior Lecturer in Economics, Tourism and Management to ask him a few questions about his academic trajectory. I studied his profile on linked in for a few clues to his background and came up with the following questions:

I noticed that as you began your undergraduate study you were employed as a trainee accountant. Did you deliberately seek out opportunities in your field? How did your experience in the workplace inform your study in the early days?

I am interested to hear more about your experience in Japan at the InterTokyo Business School. What was your role there and how did it prepare you for the work that was to come as a lecturer in cross-cultural communication and international business?

Brookfield (1995) talks about how critical reflection is the process of hunting assumptions. He identifies three types of assumptions; paradigmatic, prescriptive and causal. What kinds of assumptions have you been hunting and how are they different between the public and private sector? How have challenging these assumptions informed your practice as an academic? Are there other assumptions evident in higher education that need challenging?

Interview questions for a colleague (mp3)

Reference

In my previous post I covered my first year experience at the University of Queensland, and a brief military misadventure. In this post, I respond to a request from a twitter follower to hear one of my seven stories which was initially posted here.

After my six month stint at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), I returned to University part time to finish a couple of failed subjects before moving into the second year of my applied science degree in human movements. I had to work to pay rent and did so as a bicycle courier, eight or nine hours a day, with a 40 minute commute each way. Needless to say I developed into an aerobic animal. When I left ADFA I was a muscular 84 kilograms. After my first 6 months of cycle couriering I had whittled that down to a wiry 72 kilograms, with most of it in my thighs.

Power Couriers were pretty accommodating when I need to study, so I was able to maintain the job for nearly 3 years until the demands of study took over and I had to give it away. I had begun to race and train with a club called Ffast, with my street skills ideally suited to short course criteriums. When the first Australian Universities Games (AUG) came to Brisbane in 1993 I wanted so badly to compete.

I registered with UQSport and was expecting their support as a student, but they denied me entry to the games because I was racing for a competitor club. Disappointed, I watched that year from the sidelines. I made the decision that the AUG was more important to me than my old cycling club, and the UQ Cycle Club became my new home. The next year we prepared for Wollongong.

Wollongong in 1994 was great, I placed fourth in the mens road race and stayed upright in the wet and windy criterium finishing with the bunch. I was just happy to be riding with a talented bunch of mates. I was putting into practice what I was learning in class about exercise management and sports science, and developing an interest in ergogenic aids, mixing my own electrolyte drinks from sourced from sports journals and utilising caffeine and gaurana (not banned substances at University level) well before Red Bull and V became popular.

The next year I volunteered to manage the team for the AUG in Darwin ‘95. But this time I knew we had to pull out a special effort to beat the heat. The games are usually held in September, this is before summer and the wet season, but the daily temperatures average above 32 degrees Celsius with a humidity above 70%. I arranged a self directed study, through the kind support of my lecturer in exercise physiology and the physiology department, which included the use of a heat chamber to prepare my athletes.

Heat training has an effect on endurance athletes similar to altitude training or blood doping. It is a legal method of increasing blood volume and therefore the ability of an athlete to carry oxygen in their blood stream. At the very least I hoped that my study would prepare my athletes psychologically for extreme temperatures and give us an advantage over the teams from the southern states.

The girls did particularly well in Darwin, one of them winning the women’s triathlon and placing second in the overall classification for road cycling. I competed well, but was on a return from injury, so not spectacularly. I was happy that I had contributed to a team success and I hope that the science I applied had something to do with it.

When I returned to Brisbane I placed third in the club’s Triple Crown, which was a small victory for someone three years earlier had been on the outside. In my final year at University I gained a practical placement at the Australian Institute of Sport in Adelaide for my work with elite cyclists. Throughout the early part of my academic trajectory I was always looking for ways to apply my knowledge to practical problems and I hope that this shines through.

Let me describe the arc of my academic career with two swords, learning and teaching.

When I left high school, I left home and lived close to the university with a family friend. I had to work to support myself, although I did receive a small amount of Austudy. I remember being very lonely, only one other senior from my high school went to UQ and he was in anthropology, and I was in human movements, so we rarely got to see each other.

In the large first-year lecture halls I enjoyed lecturers that were, in a sense, theatrical. Perhaps this is what I remember because large gestures are conveyed further when your seat is way up the back. I found much of university life in my first year intimidating and socially scary so I traded it in for a short stint at the Australian Defence Force Academy. In the summer between the end of my first year and the start of my term at ADFA I had plenty of time to read and get fit.

I swam every day, ran and rode my bike to prepare for military life. I also read several books that shaped my understanding of conflict and scholarship (as any good officer cadet should). From Miyamoto Musashi I read The Book of Five Rings, where he talked about "the school of two swords" and how a warrior prepares for death each day and ready to rush headlong to meet it, in doing so frees himself from fear and hesitation. This philosophy of seeking stillness when all is chaos and finding an eternal presence without regret, or fear, is with me even today.

I read Sun Tzu's Art of War, which frames all human relations as a struggle between competing agendas that are prey to influence from external factors and subjective belief. His insights helped me grasp the concept that acting decisively outweighs appropriate planning in quickly changing conditions. But most importantly;

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”

As is similarly inscribed on the entrance to the Delphic Oracle, "know thyself". My exposure to Confucian, Buddhist and Hellenic thought forced a fierce examination of my purpose in life. That and the pressure cooker of adjusting to military conventions lead to the realisation that my quest to become a warrior was metaphoric and did not require the literal act of murder.

Eiji Yoshikawa's glorification of the life of Musashi in his serialised novel by the same name gave possible clues to the ultimate goal of the warrior's life, to lead others and finally one's self to self-actualisation through an application of the way of the warrior to art and culture. Musashi claimed in his Book of Five Rings that "When I apply the principle of strategy to the ways of different arts and crafts, I no longer have a need for a teacher in any domain."

I returned to University soon after returning to Brisbane but was out of step with my study and unable to gain financial assistance so I turned my passion for cycling into an income becoming a bicycle courier for Power Couriers.

I've been asked to reflect on my trajectory through higher education and to be honest, I've been having trouble with the overabundance of definitions for reflection. Words tend to use their power when they are overused, and I had come to believe that the word was used in the sense of a passive contemplation. I wasn't happy that reflection, in that sense, had any power to describe what I do in practice. Until yesterday.

While attempting to track down the recommended text for my coursework (ED5300) I stumbled across an excerpt from Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen Brookfield. He starts with the declaration "we teach to change the world". I was so encouraged by this that I almost blurted it out to a fellow cyclist on my ride into work today, when he bemoaned the fact that he would rather be riding but had to find a way to pay the bills. That, my friend, is not all there is to work and play.

I believe in the transformative power of education. Education has the power to change lives, starting with my own. When I hear declarations like Brookfield's I am inspired to continue developing academically so that I bring that power to others. But there was something more that appealed to me in his idea that reflection was about hunting assumptions.

Hunting assumptions for me becomes the primal intellectual urge. It is not just something I can do, but something that I must.

Education as an industry has been built upon assumptions that no longer apply. We see the crushing weight of student loans in the United States in an economic environment which makes it nearly impossible to earn enough to pay them back. We see student activists in South America demanding education be returned to the people, free for all and guaranteed by the government. We see similar student uprisings against fee-hikes in the UK and other global unrest that some are calling a metamovement.

So as I begin to reflect on my academic trajectory, I do so with a warrior stance.

Highly recommend reading below. How do you approach reflection in practice? Is it something you bring actively, powerfully?

This complete online course, designed to help grad students develop an identity as a professional scholar, is offered on Connexions and is available for remixing under Creative Commons CC-BY.