Is This Post Normal

A massive happy new year to everyone. What on earth can I say that has not already been said about 2020. Apart from lots of love to all my friends and whānau over the seas. We truly at this point have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to social, cultural and educational matters within New Zealand and I have to acknowledge this as I approach the new school year.

In his keynote speech at Ulearn this year Professor O’Connor talked about Post-normal times (https://www.teritotoi.org/ - an excellent resource for teachers). How can we as teachers go forward into 2021 in this ever-changing eduscape.

Last year I was lucky enough to be awarded the Dr Vince Ham eFellowship and spent the year completing an action research project around eSports. The project though fascinating was only half of the journey and the truly exciting part of the programme was spending time talking education with exciting educators like Sarah Te One, Kit Haines (@akiwiteacher), Hamish Barclay, Anna-Marie Keighley, Karen Nicholls, Nathan Walsh and Patty Barbosa. The educational conversation tended to be on steroids we would play with the whole education system, turn it upside down, stare at it and wonder what could be. I will miss this and wonder how I can continue to push myself into these conversations.

Imagine this point last year when you were prepping for the new school year, what true effect did it have and how much of an impact did it make. This is not me preaching nonchalance going into the year though far from it I feel that we need to go into this year with more purpose and focus than ever clearly understanding what we are planning to achieve and how we would measure that. I plan to share my own learning goals with the students. These will be broad enough to fit all classes and accessible by the student. Goal one is for me to be actively using Te Reo more in the classroom. This is to be done in an authentic way, which is going to be more of a challenge though it is easy to entwine the Social studies curriculum in a Māori context how can I continue to develop my understanding of the language within this context.

Goal two is to continue to develop authentic ways for the students to engage with the curriculum within my classroom. I will start this by trying to encourage students to share their own goals within the term and regularly have them to curate their work in a shared space. I already enjoyed some success with this last year by developing a Human Rights gallery for students to share their research on a Human rights topic.

In post-normal times I hope with a keen eye on our growth through this year we can enjoy 2021.

Duncan Trickey