In the name of Allah, the most gracious,
the most merciful.
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| Inside the Grand Mosque Abu Dhabi |
After 15 months of blogging, we have finally moved, thank you Allah, but we will miss Schaapkraal so. So it is time to put the Schaapkraal Diaries to bed; though not before a quick run-down of the last two weeks.
I really enjoyed my visit to the conference
in Oslo on learning outside of the formal education system, alternating between
formal, informal and non-formal. Norway is beautiful, safe, green, efficient as is expected of a First
world country - everyone is out walking, running or cycling because its summer.
Perpetual light it never gets dark at all, well maybe a bit. For Muslims in
Europe this Ramadhan is going to be long fasting days. (My children fasted
about 19 hours in South Korea one year and they were exhausted but ate
nutritiously when they broke fast and rested when they felt the need.) I
enjoyed walks down by the riverside - complete serenity watching the water run
rapidly like a moving painting.
Really enjoyed conference presentations – some more than others, here
are some snapshots of my highlights.A paper delivered by Dawid Niccolini of the University of Warwick .The title of his talk was Understanding expertise as a multi situated practice - expertise as socio-material mastery ostensibly exercised in accomplishing specific discursive (bodily or worldly) tasks recognised as superior by peers.
He offered a case study of a collaborating valve
replacement team (TAVI) which is a situated performance. It’s about
accomplishing efforts and combining knowing in practice from different players
where experts become novices again by functioning in a new environment. Thus
expertise is fluid and expertise knowledge is not in any one person but in the
team.
Another speaker who mesmerized with his
paper was Yrjö Engeström - Analysing expansive learning
– learning actions and expressions and transformative agency, offering a
case study of a school in Boa Vista, Sao Paulo in Brazil. He addressed 3
things: Expansive learning; The Change Laboratory and analyses/empirical about
these issues.
The case - a river runs through the school;
the flooding river impacts on movement to and from school and the garbage that
is swept along causes disease. Students and parents
conflicts of motives – is of course the risk of becoming ill or injured should
they attend. Whilst teachers’ conflicts of motives – should they close the
school? Do they risk getting sick and making their students sick too? I appreciated his reference to Vygotski’s ZPD;
describing Expansive learning as the joint journey across the collective
Zone of Proximal Development and how they solved their dilemma with collaborative
efforts and good management tools. It made me think about some of our students
who run the gauntlet to come to campus from gang-infested areas.
The third speaker whose paper really rocked
was David Greenwood of the University of Cornell. He spoke about Global Neo
Taylorism/Neo Liberalism in the Anti Bildung and the future of universities.
He started his talk with the crises in
Higher Education all over the world and the distance between private elite
universities and public universities, describing them as departmentalized silos
that compete for budgets. The only way to have exciting collaborative work at
universities is to bring in outside money. Universities are hierarchical and removed from
knowledge production with pseudo leadership and pseudo compliance where
research establishes cartels for citing and student debt crises escalate.
He asks that crucial question: “What do they
mean when they say they want to educate workers for 21st century
learning?” To be better customers and
slaves to materialism? Completely agree. So he also asks what kind of person
are we producing in universities? We are lost in Meritocracy. But what to do? Reconsider how the structure
works and change the structure. If there is enough people who are unhappy there
are enough people to start an arena.
My favourite site visit was to the BLOK - Florist
Apprentices Learning Centre, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the coordinator
of BLOK is a smart, eloquent and compassionate educator who knows her trade
well and has the ability to engage her students and tutors in a dynamic way.
She takes a keen interest in each learner and stimulates their learning with
novel and current pedagogic techniques and devices. They have a blended
learning approach, a closed online platform specifically
developed for them which includes an e-portfolio. I recognized most of the
flowers they use in their floral repertoires such as peonies, lisianthus,
campanula, snap dragons and ferns of all sorts. And students are also using their smart phones to take pictures of their work and submit online for feedback and evaluation.
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| Iznik tiles |
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| view from the top |
The next day we visited the Burj Khalifa and in a jiffy up 163 floors we looked down from the top - an almost eerie view of the buildings and movements below hazy in the dust storm. Then off to Abu Dhabi where the muathin’s call invites so beautifully. We also visited the Grand Mosque of Sh Zayed which was enchanting with its jade inlays and Iznik blue tile art. The wudhu section was so awe-inspiring, I was scared to lift my feet towards the fountains of water cascading over marble. Everything was so perfectly shiny that I could not resist a short run and a slide over polished surfaces.
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| Mother of pearl in lay on pillars |
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| sliding on the marble |
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| inside the dome |
So this is the end of the Schaapkraal diaries Alhamdulillah -
a chapter closes and a new one beckons. Methinks I will call my next blog, the Wynberg
Chronicles, watch this space.
Asalaamu alaykum and peace be with you all!
Plant food not lawn.
Yasmine
