Since raising a professional/teaching/study blog from the ashes of my more random, prehistoric personal blog, I have often wondered where the parameters of professional blogging should lie. This blog does have a theme, after all, and the entries should reflect that theme – at least for the most part.
Yet professional blogs, particularly in the field of education, are common. The better ones contain frequent nuggets of solid gold information… but more than that, they have a unique quality. They portray personality as well as professionalism. This has reminded me that every professional is, at heart, still a person. In fact, it is a unique personal history that brings us each to our field, and that personal history may, on occasion, justify a blog post. This, I have decided, is one of those occasions.
As a teacher I have an unwavering belief that learning should be supported by a broad base of meaningful activity. Those I have specifically investigated include technology and the arts. Creative endeavour has always been close to my heart: today it is embodied in my educational philosophy, but it has been integral to my approach to life. Today’s post is about a creative endeavour that has been following me around the globe for almost two decades.
In 1990, an old Afrikaans poem on a friend’s wall sprung into song as I looked at it. Soon I was performing it with my lifelong comrade and collaborator, Krisjan Fourie, who today is an iconic entrepreneur. As my ventures abroad and forays into my on cultural identity began, the poem set to music evolved into an investigation of exile, particularly among young South Africans, one million of whom are estimated to be living abroad. Many of those unaccounted for in the statistics are teaching English. Dis Al ii combines the adapted lyrics with photographs I have taken within South Africa and beyond. It is no masterpiece, but it is an important reminder of my heritage, the questions it raises, and perhaps most significantly that every professional is, at heart, a person with a unique tale to tell.
It is, I believe, justification to sound a personal note in the professional realm.
1 comment:
A very interesting post! I like your point about the individualism of a teacher. We often forget that teachers are individuals, with their own story, experiences and skills. THose are the precise things that we bring to bare on our classroom practise and methodology.
I think you raise another good point in this post about identity and creativity. The 'embedding' of who we are as people into our 'academic' lives, is for me what makes learning meaningful.
Post a Comment