Day one was really enjoyable and contained a lot of information and a lot of interesting things to think about.
I really enjoyed learning from Tim and John about the different ways in which a group talks. Tim talked about how in some cultures (in particular Western cultures), we take turns in talking, with one conversation being the sole focus, whereas in other cultures there is more of a “popcorn” approach to conversation, where everyone talks at once. I could relate this back to my own experiences, and to how the family of my ex-partner would very much take the “popcorn” approach. I can remember always finding this a struggle to be a part of. It was interesting to learn of this terminology from Tim and John and also to also think about how these dynamics are formed culturally and how they affect teaching and how we expect students to behave. I would say that as a teacher, I am more comfortable/confident in one-to-one conversation, and it also feels on Foundation that this is how students are most communicative. I would hypothesise that if a student if of a more introverted nature, then the goldfish bowl or turn-taking approach may work best initially at least.
We then went on to look at our preparatory reading texts. We had four different texts in our group, and it was interesting to hear about the texts from fellow teacher/students. The texts seemed to vary in content, but they all held an interest for us. Two of the texts, focused on how the worlds of teacher/practitioner collide and feed off one another. This made for interesting discussion points around how we can use our own practices as artists and makers to think about and offer practical guidance as teachers for our students. Tim termed this discussion approach as the “goldfish bowl” approach – where someone starts a conversation, other people speak and then it ends with the first speaker. This made me think of group crits and how as a teacher, we can initiate and help to feed different ways of conversing for students and how these different dynamics can work better for some students than others. For example, if English is not your first language, the popcorn approach may be hard to follow.