I had been engaging with the recorded video meeting discussing the Professional Portfolio assignment due on the 21st of September. It is a unique time in this course’s history as the Study Visit and Professional Placement will most likely both be delivered online. Makes sense from both an epidemiological point of view and in terms of the potential of information management but I will miss the personal contact and connections.
For my virtual Study Visit the three options I have elected to attend live are University of Newcastle Makerspace, Monash University Library, and the Museum Library of Museums Victoria which I feel is a fair reflection of my stated directions and intentions for me in this course. I expect I will also watch recordings of some of the others as there are more interesting ones available.
I had always dreamed of being able to study again without work getting in the way and now the pandemic has seen me nearly completing my sixth week of not going into work and yet it has not been as easy and carefree as I’d imagined in my fantasy as the pandemic sucks away the energy that would power the free time to explore. It has however given me more time be reflective.
As I’m read through my assigned readings of week 9 on leadership in schools many memories are flooding back of my time as a Pre-service teacher:
- Ravensthorpe District High School which offered schooling for K-10 in a predominantly agricultural community where I pre-service taught 3 weeks in a 5-6 class
- University of Canberra High School Kaleen which offered years 7 -10 where I pre-service taught 5 weeks of English and Circus
- Observation days in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands School in Warburton in the years 1-2 and 3-4 for 9 days at the beginning of my course
- Observation for 2 weeksThe Southport School which was a K-12 school of 1305 students with 276 boarders in years 7 – 12 where I observed Mandarin, English, and Drama
The quote that has really stuck out for me from the readings in this reflective process was
“The stress and burnout process may begin as early as the student-teaching experience. The attrition rate among early career teachers is 50%” (Cross, 2015)
My experience of embarking as a pre-service teacher to becoming provisionally registered teacher at a secondary school to leaving the coal face of schools for the warm embrace of the GLAM sector was challenging on a number of levels including leadership, ICT, and whatever the third theme of my portfolio reflection will be and my own personal faults which I cannot blame on the system.
I feel like while I’m in a reflective phase it would be helpful to go through them in order to write down my journey in education and towards being an educator in order to reflect further throughout the process of creating my professional portfolio.
Undergraduate Context
I completed my undergraduate degree at the end of 2014 after having supported myself through the fruits of my labor, teaching, and performances for 8 years after finishing my Diploma of Circus Arts at the end of 2006. My degree was cobbled together with units from 4 different universities.
In 2011 I did 2 semesters at the University of Wollongong majoring in Performance; doing a Bachelor of Arts. I had applied and been accepted into both the Bachelor of Education and the Bachelor of Arts as my goal of attending university was to achieve legitimacy as a teacher due to realising that though I was accessing students in schools as part of Social Circus outreach work the difference I could make to those students and the limits to the access was curtailed by not having legitimacy within the formal education space except as an outside contractor so I set the goal of being a qualified teacher within a school teaching circus. My dream that I sought came true but the challenges I faced in my journey felt overwhelming and I left the sector.
By enrollment day I had only received a letter of acceptance from the Arts Faculty but when I came to the applicable part of enrollment where I was asked to choose between offers they informed me that I had the choice of Arts or Education as I’d been accepted into both. This bureaucratic bungle was the first instance of the ongoing issues I would have with education systems in my quest to become a qualified teacher; I didn’t think much of it at the time but now feel like it was the first red flag to the bull of progress in the china shop of life. I hadn’t put any more thought into the Bachelor of Education since I applied as I hadn’t heard back from them but looking back now I could have traversed the same path I eventually traveled with a stronger foundation in the education part rather than going over many similar aspects of movement and performance that I had explored in my Circus Diploma by majoring in Performance
If I had enrolled in the Bachelor of Primary Education at UOW then I still would have had the first year of learning and exploration that my eventual pathway required but would have included units of psychology, Indigenous geography, and human development. After completing 2 semesters of Performance related units with 1 elective in creative writing and 1 elective in Indigenous Studies my partner suggested we audition for a gig touring around schools doing performances for a year living in our own vehicle. We were offered the gig and given 3 days to choose and went for it.
So I spent 2012 touring around the whole of Australia visiting an extremely diverse range of schools across 64,000km of driving. In this one year I presume I was probably in the top 1% of people who visit large numbers of Australian schools and found that schools varied greatly in the feel generated from the playground and staff room and we could reliably predict how the audience would be from these factors. This illustrated to me the great diversity of schools and led me to realise that I had already visited more schools than some teachers must have as a performance artist and that I had experience and perspectives unique to my own journey.
Following the challenges of touring up to 5 shows in one vehicle for a year I moved to Albany in Western Australia to complete the 2nd and 3rd year of my undergraduate studies at the Albany Campus of the University of Western Australia. I gave myself the target of graduating within 2 years with majors in ‘Anthropology and Sociology” and ‘English and Cultural Studies’ which resonated nicely with the electives I had chosen in my first year of university.
The flexibility of study structure, rules of matriculation , and pathways to graduation within the time frame I set myself led to a convolution of pathways that eventually got me to where I wanted to go. My first semester in Albany I began 100 level anthropology studies and started with a 200 level english unit. My second semester I successfully cross-institutionally enrolled in New Zealand’s Massey University to do a 200 level Anthropology unit on food and a 300 level English/Gender Studies Literature in order to keep moving towards my goal within the limited unit offerings at my tiny regional campus. That semester I also began fulfilling the ‘broadening requirements’ by studying units outside the faculty granting my degree (Arts) in the newly constructed science faculty building which were 100 level science units ‘Plant and Animal Biology’ and ‘Anatomy and Human Physiology’. In my 3rd semester I overloaded to do 5 units which were a mix of level 200 and 300 Anthropology and English before completing a mid-semester break exchange for 6 weeks at the National University of Singapore studying ‘Introduction to Mandarin’ and ‘Field Studies in Biodiversity’ working with their honors biology students on the island of Tioman Pulau in Malaysia. This left me in my final semester just 4 units to complete once I had convinced the Head of Honours in Anthropology to consider my Indigenous unit from Wollongong as equivalent to their first year anthro intro unit.
This process involved a lot of asking for what I wanted to achieve, receiving various answers of ‘no and I’m not sure that is possible’ before finding another way to satisfy both the official requirements and my personal goals. I often have felt within this process of engaging with the educative bureaucracy that I not only don’t fit into the boxes they have prepared but that I inhabit the cracks between the boxes and seek understanding and insight from where the systems break down.
Post Graduate Context
At the end of 2014 my partner had finished her Masters of Education and was offered work as a teacher in the remote Indigenous community of Warburton on the lands held by the Ngaanyatjarra. I enrolled in what I had researched as the best option for me to continue towards my goal which was the Graduate Diploma of Education (Middle Years) offered by La Trobe University which had the majority of the course delivered online with 3 block courses delivered from their Shepparton Campus throughout the year.
I flew out of the community, after living there for a month, on the post plane from Warburton via Alice Springs to Melbourne and then caught the V-line to Shepparton to meet my new cohort. My realisations included that Education seemed a more diverse demographic than Circus performers or Arts faculty students. We had people who were moving into teaching from business, people who were passionate about maths, geologists waxing lyrical about science and I was very excited by this opportunity to expand my relational circles. I missed my plane back at the end of this trip but my partner worked quick smart to get me back to her via Kalgoorlie the next day.
I then had my first observational placement in the Indigenous community which consisted of 9 days across the year 1-2 class and year 3-4 class. The 1-2 class had about 5 students on the first day I was there and this got as high as 7 which felt less manageable due to the multiple needs that multiple students were presenting with. Some hadn’t slept, some needed food, some had to wear a special hearing hat, some had fetal alcohol syndrome. I was challenged by students being better served by doing the same tasks daily than seeking the novelty and stimulation of educational possibilities that was my preferred style of learning. I wrote about technology in the classroom for one of my assignments and focused on the tape player with external microphone that had only the tape for NSW road safe songs. This, but for the IWB, was the most advanced piece of technology that the students interacted with. The year 3-4 class scared me even more as the experienced teacher in this class had settled on shouting at the students as her preferred behavior management strategy. That swimming was part of their schooling was heavenly relief for the friday reward and I was excited and inspired to see maths taught by the throwing and collecting of tokens into the pool.
My relationship did not last through term 1 of that school year so despite having a plan to complete my teaching qualification and spend 1-3 years in the community I ended up as an itinerant scholar for the next part of my course and ended up networking my way through the various observations and practicums I had to do to complete my course.
The next educational institution I observed was The Southport School where the Head of Languages took me into her class based on my 6 week intro to Mandarin experience. This school had a lot of money and was a stark contrast to the Ngaanyatjarra lands school. I observed not only Mandarin classes but also English and Drama. I watched a drama competition in one of their theatres and was undefeated in a lunch time chess club. I delivered some juggling to their gifted program and attended the teacher’s PD article club. I also visited their school library and was encouraged by one of their teacher librarians in my stated intent to pursue librarianship in the future. He remarked that they needed more men in the profession and I saw effective Teacher Librarian teaching where the class was digitally grouping different images they had found for a task in a shared google doc projected up for all to see.
My first official practicum where I actually taught was in the 5-6 class at Ravensthorpe District High School where I did three weeks focusing on an English/History combined unit I wrote where we acted out stories of outlaw bushmen, made alter egos of ourselves as bushmen, made a radio ad encouraging visitors to come and visit our fictional history heritage in Ravensthorpe and then made posters about our the stories we had created.
The teacher in this class was the most helpful of any during my practicum and wrote feedback live into a book as I was teaching. I remember in my first class she noted that a table of boys was swordfighting with scissors under their table and I just didn’t notice at all so I quickly got better at frequently scanning the whole room. The teacher has a feud with the principal which probably didn’t help my case so I only got to meet the principal once. I accessed some tangible maths resources in order to teach volume, capacity, and area which went very well allowing me to explore as an educator through constructivism to constructionism and remember a student bringing me their finished creation only to have it break in their hands as they showed me their successful solution. I remember being challenged by a student who was moving between my class and the one below who came back on a day that I had prepared a maths test and didn’t get a single answer correct and being told that I should have done better to allow for her individual circumstance and feeling like it was the system making it harder for her and for me and how challenging the extra work to ensure each student had equal opportunity was.
I taught a science lesson on expanding gases where the failures were more about staging the audience during the demonstration so that everyone could see and I looked at comparative advertising between NZ and Australia in order to create persuasive texts.
and finally I did 5 weeks at University of Canberra High School Kaleen.
In this practicum I taught a Year 7 English class focusing on the book by John Marsden ‘So Much to Tell You’ by constructing a bibliography of terms (which felt like pulling teeth at the time but was reported as very popular by students at the end), reading the book, making audio recordings of the book with ipads, doing a read through of a scene from a theatrical staging of the text, and doing close readings of the poetry in the book. My theory was that not all students would read the book but by approaching it in so many ways they would each be able to access the content and be able to discuss it in class and in their assignments. The end result was effective as in the second part of their term they constructed an essay on the text as a class in just a few lessons and their teacher sent it to me with glowing compliments on how the class had been able to work at a tertiary level. The process of teaching, the issues of behavior management, and the resources available all made my time teaching this quite challenging. The school library had a person that was not dual qualified and my interactions with them went as far as them lending me ipads which they would wipe once I returned at the end of class meaning I could not keep any apps current and had to redownload per ipad any apps I wanted students to use for each class. Another example of why hardware designed for a singular owner and operator does not translate well into the shared resource environment of the school system.
The other part of my practicum at Kaleen was teaching the circus classes towards their performance at the ACT’s school spectacular ‘Limelight’ this went well but was probably above the necessary required level that should be required of a pre-service teacher like getting a pre-service drama teacher to put on a full production. We had stilts, juggling, acrobatics, contortion, acrobalance and choreographed the work around the dance student’s piece to provide a large multi genre work. The performance day happened after I had satisfied my 5 week requirements but I went anyway to ensure continuity for the project and students all the way to the end.
Following the practicum experience and after completing all the assignments required I did the final task required for me to satisfy the requirements of my teacher education course. I completed a 2 week internship in November with the Learning Services Team at the National Museum of Australia that I had first inquired about in June that year while riding around Lake Burliegh Griffin on my bicycle visiting each national institution in turn to see if there were any opportunities that aligned with my course. This was my favourite experience of the whole of my Graduate Diploma and set me on the path I tread today as a GLAM man professional.
Immediately following the completion of my practicum in August I was offered a position by Warehouse Circus as their Education Officer and Circus Trainer. They had been running the Circus program at Kaleen by providing trainers who were then supervised by a teacher (or in the same room as a teacher who was doing things on their laptop) so that the students could pick it as an elective. Warehouse were very keen to get a teacher employed in the school who could teach circus and they could also employ to make communication and planning easier across the program. Warehouse said they would offer me a full time position or any equivalent hours to make my role up to full time that were not taken up by being employed as a teacher in the school who I was told were keen to have me on their staff.
I walked out of that meeting ecstatic that in one potential form or another I had reached my intended goal of being able to effect change by teaching Circus within a school.
I met with the then principal Dennis and the Warehouse Circus Director a couple of days later which made it all feel so real and within reach and learned that I would teach two classes a week on a rotating fortnightly schedule in the school and that Warehouse Circus would offer me teaching outside school hours and office work at other times to make my position combination equivalent to full time. Principal Dennis ended up leaving the school before I started and there was a key part of my onboarding into the profession that was missed here and that was to ensure I had the correct registrations to work as a teacher, and for the school to employ me, which I would have been able to apply for as soon as I received my final transcripts. For my role in the ACT I was required to have both registration with the Teaching Quality Institute and to apply for employment with the ACT’s Education Directorate and I couldn’t do the latter until I had done the former. I take responsibility for failing in the first hurdle as despite teaching, observing, and studying my course in Victoria, Western Australia, Queensland, and the ACT I should have picked up the need for registration in the place I ended up. I had no idea about the second part though and feel that the transition of principals and the uniqueness of the construction of my role lead to great difficulty.
I turned up on the first day without having had any further communication. They discovered I wasn’t registered and said they could not pay me as a teacher. I did not have all the paperwork to immediately do what was required and so the TQI registration took about a month while Warehouse Circus covered my wages at their community circus trainer rates rather than me receiving the full teacher wages for my time as a teacher that I had been expecting and budgeting for. Due to the new principal miscommunicating with me about what registration I required with the ACT Education Directorate (saying to apply for a contract rather than making it clear she was planning to employ me as a casual) I was unable to move forward quickly with the registration amidst commencing my first term in school teaching and only got all the required boxes ticked two months into my journey as a qualified teacher.
During this term I had no access to any school emails, printers, or internet as despite submitting the paperwork correctly the Education Directorate lost the required paperwork and I was advised by our bursar to submit again near the end of term 1. This led to situations in term 1 where I would turn up to teach a class but the whole school would be leaving to go to a swimming carnival. Or a teacher would tell me we had parent teacher interviews the day before they were happening and I would already be booked in to teach one of my regular after hours circus classes. The structure of the school day and professional life did not fit with the franken-job that had been created for me. Each organisation saw me as a way to fulfill certain needs that would advance their goals but neither took the care to ensure I was ready and would be able to sustainably occupy the position. I would have been better of teaching a full teaching load that included circus classes as well as English or SOSE which I was qualified to do because that would have meant that I would have been in tune with the rhythm of the school and been able to attend all the meetings with the other staff members and been up to date with things like the all school swimming carnival excursion. But instead I had a foot in both camps and stability in neither.
After completing my registration processes by the end of term 1 and then having required time off for eye surgery early in term 2 for which I had not built up any leave as a teacher in term one and had to apply for leave without payment and then being overpayed for that time and having payments clawed back out of my wages I felt by the end of term 2 that I was just starting to get my head above water with school systems, assignments, and teaching when I received the phone call from the National Museum of Australia offering me a temporary 3 month contract which became my pathway into the GLAM sector. I jumped at this chance and ended up working in the education team for a year presenting and researching, including developing my own program to present on Australia’s Federation. As I was coming to the end of my final contract there I saw many of the museum jobs I was looking at had ‘Eligibility for Associate Membership of ALIA” as one of the preferred qualifications and this was the first time that I truly considered that becoming a librarian might be part of my actual career. I felt welcomed by the museum library team at NMA and how they helped my research process and had a trolley near the door of books available for anyone to take and I picked up a few on museum education through that.
I did eventually change to working in another museum, once called the National Sports Museum and now called the Australian Sports Museum after completing a six month refurbishment process costing $17 million, where I have been for nearly 3 years and now have my first ever permanent contract at a pretty convenient time given the economic convulsions of the pandemic. This stability has given me the time to study the Masters of Education (Teacher Librarianship) which was the best way I could see for someone qualified as a teacher to become qualified as a librarian. The potential roles I see for myself in the future are to continue within my current museum, to become a university librarian, to work with university special collections in a university museum, to work in a public library, or even potentially if there was a well supported and well resourced role as a school librarian to give school life another chance.
Reference
Cross, D. (2015). Teacher well being and its impact on student learning [Slide presentation]. Telethon Kids Institute, University of Western Australia. http://www.research.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2633590/teacher-wellbeing-and-student.pdf
