Reflection on Unit 3 Theory/ Practice Peer review
Walk calmly
Breathe
Arrive earlier
Open the Windows
Don’t rush. Even if you are late. Don’t make a mistake on top of the other
Be there, be present, that´s the only thing that matters now
Leave on time.
Talking To A Goldfish was a collaborative project that I did while I was in residency at Doremi, in Cumbria, resulting from the ideas and voices of one of another artist in residency Meg Norongchai and I.
The aim was exploring both voices and communicate with each other using mainly sounds that resonate in a quarry of disused inter-linqued quarries and the main chamber. The sing was no longer related to semantic meaning. The voice was reduced to listening, one voice calling another, one voice responding to another.
I was thinking of this work as a metaphor for the classroom, particularly in the session Unit 3 Theory/Practice Peer review. Fundamental things such as being fully present, listen to the students and follow up with the right comment or right question are dependent on self care and awareness.
In this session I was noticeable tired. I am sleep deprived. Because of my workload, I have been going to bed late and my son, wakes up very early and also still wakes up in the middle of the night. I also have a solo exhibition in Germany in April.
I had to stop and restart again! Sometimes things don’t go as plan and one has to accept that there’s no such thing as perfection, although the aim is that. However it is good to be aware that there’s more than preparing the lesson for the class. There’s a whole world of emotions and other kind of powerful language that influence the learning.
I recently read The Slow Professor by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, which I mentioned in another post, and I was deeply inspired by some of the writings.
Some notes on that:
“…faculty stress directly affects student learning. We know from experience that when we walk into a classroom breathless, rushed, and preoccupied, the class doesn’t go well; we struggle to make connections with the material and our students.”
“In a 2008 study reported in the Journal of Educational Psychology on ´Teacher´s Ocupational Well-Being and the Quality of Instruction,” researchers conclude that ´a combination of high engagement… with the capacity to emotionally distance of high engagement… with the capacity to emotionally distance oneself from work and cope with failure (resilience) is associated with both high levels of occupational well-being (low levels of exhaustion, high job satisfaction) and better instructional performance, and it turns leads to favourable student outcomes`(Klusmann et al. 702). In other words, professors´well-being is inextricably linked with students´s learning.
“Words such as ´inspiring,´stimulating,´engaging and ´thought provoking all express affect, so that ´thinking and caring` about a topic” … “are frequently linked in a single phrase. Students, it seems, make no distinction between how they felt in a course and how they thought; their emotions – whether positive or negative – were integral to how they learned.”