1.

First thoughts

I believe that the role of the teacher is to make students aware of

the implicit value of understanding and constructing meaning about
our world. Of course it falls to the teacher to mediate and direct
this learning process so that students can undertake that most
fundamental learning activity - moving from what they know
towards the construction of new knowledge. This should involve
ICT’s being integrated into the curriculum; not as some add-on, but
as a equally valid spoke, essential to the well-being of the whole
wheel that I think of as classroom education. A pleasant bonus
should be that ICT’s are perceived as being fun by my students. I
think that good ICT teachers (or teachers simply teaching ICT’s
reasonably well) can take this positive predisposition towards ICT
integration and work towards significant learning outcomes with
their students.

Of course having said this, technology isn’t a magic bullet. For

technology to be effective in the classroom, it requires not only
effective planning and preparation for inclusion in one’s program, it
also requires an adequate understanding of constructivist pedagogy
and a clear understanding of what sort of benefits it is that you
want to achieve from using the technology in the first place. To
consider these ideas I’ve kept a bit of a journal and organised it
around a couple of questions about intellectual development
(nature/nurture) and creativity.
 2.
Is Children's intellectual development a question of
nature, nurture, both of these or neither?

I think that a Child's intellectual development is neither solely a

question of nature or nurture. Intellectual ability might seem like
nature at times simply because some of us tend to naturally prefer
to express ourselves in ways that we are good at and most
comfortable with. I think that my classrooms have been well
populated over the years with kids that have excellent recall, neat
handwriting and an ability to memorise facts. Of course if these
skills are explicitly favored by the type of learning experiences that
I offer up then such students will appear to be very clever indeed.
Tests and learning experiences are easy to do well in if they come
in a form that you already know how to do well in. Without having
taught a person or being able to account for how they developed
their abilities, I’ve been inclined to attribute ‘natural ability’ to the
kids in my classes that do well. Unsurprisingly these kids have
great in-class attitudes

However I don't believe that this means that a student can't have
their abilities developed across or outside a narrow range of extant
linguistic, artistic or intellectual capacities. Consistent with Howard
Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (M.I's), I think that
people have different specific creative strengths across the
linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic,
interpersonal , intrapersonal (and now naturalistic) intelligences. As
a teacher I will certainly encourage a student to develop their
talents in the areas that they are strongest in, but as someone who
aspires to be a good teacher ... Well, I will also be trying to help a
student develop across a full range intelligences or creative
abilities.

In Gardner's view, a persons strengths or "ways of knowing the

world," although distinctive, combine within each individual to
create a "profile of intelligences" that differ from person to person
(Gardner, 1991). The key idea is that when I’m trying to be a good
teacher thinking about his teaching practice, I’m going to try to
provide a range of opportunities for my students to experience
ICT’s or whatever it is that I’m teaching in ways that support
outcomes across a range of intelligence's/ways of knowing. This
idea influences my position that linguistic, mathematical, artistic
and intellectual development are neither solely a question of nature
or nurture, but rather the products of both.

Despite what I see to be the many failures that I’ve ‘enjoyed’ in the
classroom I believe that as a classroom teacher I should be trying
to meet the needs of my students by targeting a diversity of M.I.
outcomes. I should be attempting to seek to develop the whole
learner rather than having the learner simply scaffold new
knowledge or experiences onto existing (or dominant) ways of
knowing/expressing the world. I have often observed students who
would engage in this kind mental activity. They simply fit new
material into an existing way of understanding. In effect, when
talking about a learning area, you end up seeing students who
always end up producing the same sort of outcomes over and over
again. I’ve also observed this mode of thinking in many of my ICT
lessons over the years. I’ve done a wonderful job of providing
learning activities where students simply regurgitate existing ideas
and practices but do so using new tools. Better lessons would have
involved me creating learning experiences that took advantage of
those new tools and what they can create. I guess that’s what’s
called ‘thinking out side of the box’.

Of course as a teacher I try to say things like “can you try to draw
it? Or can you write about it from a different point of view? Can you
show me using this? Or can you join into a group and share those
or explain those ideas? Can you do something different with this
tool?” In effect I’m always trying to be something of a "personal
development worker" for my students - guiding them into new ways
of understanding or processing learning experiences. Success is
variable and I suspect this is because at some level I’m simply
creating lessons that favor a narrow range of intelligences and I’m
guilty of ‘tacking on’ additional learning styles to the periphery. This
has profound implications for how I think about using ICT’s in my
teaching practice. Greenspan, a paediatric psychiatrist at George
Washington University, states that "Nature affects nurture affects
nature and back and forth. Each step influences the
next" (Greenspan in Peyser & Underwood, 1997). I think this
proposition captures the fundamental duality of the nature/nurture
question. It's not a question of either/or - the problem is essentially
unresolveable if looked at in this way - like a chicken and the egg
type problem.

What does this mean in practice? Well at the simplest level it tells
me that I can’t simply add ICT’s and expect my teaching to be
magically better. I need to hunt out those magically better ideas
first and then think about how technology might empower those
ideas. Beyond this it tells me that education is not just about
knowledge transmission or having students simply assimilate what
they are presented with according to pre-existing schemas.
Education is also about students experiencing new types of learning
outcomes and constructing new schemas. More often than not my
use of technology fails in this respect because I’m simply getting
students to do old things in new ways using dominant intelligences.
I should be trying to explore ways of doing new things with new
tools using less dominant intelligences. As I write these words I am
specifically thinking of moving my students across Vygotsky's Zone
of Proximal Development. The moving of students towards learning
outcomes across ways of knowing allows one to argue that the
intellectual development of children can be both the result of nature
and nurture. So while our strengths (i.e. most dominant ways of
knowing) could be seen as driving us in certain directions this does
not mean that effective nurturing (or providing of appropriate
learning activities) cannot expand or develop a student across
multiple ways of understanding or constructing knowledge about
the world.

This implies (to me anyway) that the brain can be "rewired" to alter
or develop different ways of knowing and understanding. Wilder
and Greenspan (1993), argue for the importance of integrating all
ways of knowing and developing each as fully as possible. They
posit that a teacher who constructs lessons built around
relationships and emotional understanding (for example) can
strengthen Gardner's interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences.
This, they contend, can effect outcomes in terms of self-regulation,
sensory reactivity, and behavioural organisation. Why then, does
my practice so often fail in this regard?

I will leave that question hanging.

So I guess, when teaching using ICT’s one must be mindful that
ultimately all students will have different strengths, weaknesses
and attitudes to the learning experience provided. However all
students should have a desire to express and think and construct
meaning about their lives and the world that they live in. It is my
role to harness that, move away from providing answers and move
towards providing guidance on the use of the tools that are in front
of the student. Working from this position I’m hoping to be able to
develop success across a range of learning styles and learning
experiences so that my students can (in turn) develop their own
ways of knowing the world. I think this also has the effect of
challenging the notion that any learning experience is “one
thing” (i.e. writing, or drawing, or painting, or using a word
processor / piece of technology) and that some people are good at
this “one thing” whilst other people are not. In discounting nature
as being that doesn’t necessarily overwhelm nurture, I am also
discounting the primacy of the idea that talent or skill can't be
taught, or accept that there will be some students who simply
cannot engage with a subject area using some sort of intelligence
or another.

Bibliography
Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach.
New York: Basic Books.

Peyser, M., & Underwood, A. (1997, Spring/Summer). Shyness, sadness, curiosity, joy. Is it
nature or nurture? In Newsweek (Special Ed.), Your child from birth to three, 60-63.

Wider, S., & Greenspan, S.I. (1993). The emotional basis of learning. In Bernard Spodek (Ed.),
Handbook of research on the education of young children, 77-87. New York: Macmillan.
 3.
On being creative

Statistics show:
That 95% of 5 year olds are highly creative
That 10% of 7 year olds are highly creative
And from 45 years onwards on 2% of adults are highly creative
(Source unknown - quoted to me years ago in a lecture)

"Highly creative" is no doubt a very contestable quality. However if

one thinks of creativity as being able to see and understand the
world and express oneself about it in a multiplicity of ways, which
includes, but is not limited to words, then perhaps I have a basis
from which I can identify the undervalued position of non-core
literacy's in my teaching practice. It seems to me that the longer I
teach the further away I end up from my early idealism and
enthusiasm. If I conceptualise teaching as a bag of pedagogic
tricks, then it seems to me that the longer I teach the less time and
importance I accord to any learning area that isn’t core. This
reduces many subjects like Art and other creative subjects to
completely specialist activities in the classroom that are subservient
to numeracy and literacy and whatever other directives we have to
face in our daily schedules. I see echoes of this in the outside
world. Art, creative enterprise, an interest in technology, or
photography: All these become completely specialist activities that
are lived out in people’s hobby lives. Or they become subject to
some sort of appreciation syndrome where someone restricts
themselves to being involved in the area through purchasing things
with the money they have earned through attaining proficiency in
the core subjects of literacy and numeracy and critical thinking.
Again this connects with the ease with which one slips into teaching
towards those literacy and numeracy intelligences. Like the
proverbial person with a hammer - everything then starts to look
like a nail and every computer tool looks like that hammer: To be
used in that one limited way.

To some extent, I think that I have bought into some sort of notion
of education where one conceptualises of it as something that, the
higher one goes, the less one values the intrinsic/creative/
emancipatory aspects of education and the more one values and
emphasises the extrinsic rewards that education is touted as being
capable of providing us with. Cash before all else. After all, isn't
that the point of all this reading and writing? To get a good job?
And so education in subjects like, for example, Art (and heaven
forbid that one use a computer for Art) moves away from being a
valued, intrinsic part of a person's education, to being a relatively
marginalised, relaxing, down-time type of subject that kills time, or
serves to be used as easy work. Think of all those tessellation's that
teachers seem to have in endless supply of for filling in gaps and
killing time. Obviously tessellation's can be used for meaningful
lessons. But are they?

As a teacher I see art as an opportunity to increase the range of

ways of doing or expressing that my students have available to
them. Thinking about how I structure my art lessons as being more
than just a time filling lesson will obviously be a good start. This is
one of the key ideas developed in this course. That the arts can
usefully have a place in the centre of the curriculum - and that that
position in the centre can be defended as making a valid,
substantial contribution to the student as a whole, more fully
developed, learner.
 4.
Shooting for the stars

Sometimes I like to step back and if not exactly smell the roses, I
do like to take stock. Thinking about applying ICT’s to my teaching
practice has given me food for thought and has reminded me that
there is more to what I do than just what I’ve been thinking about
when I get stuck in my daily teaching routine.

At any rate, I’ve enjoyed undertaking this course. It’s strange, but I
find it hard to think ‘big picture’ without outside prompting. I still
aspire to be more, to achieve more and to do better in as many
ways as I can. I want the same for my students and believe that
the creative use of ICT’s can do much to transform my teaching and
improve the experience of both myself and my students in the
classroom.