Final words, last laughs and new adventures

In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.

Inside the Grand Mosque Abu Dhabi

 

  13 June 2015.

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 21^st 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.


Iznik tiles

view from the top

A final picnic on the island and I was off to Dubai where I was met by family, whisked away to a superb hotel for a short sleep and a shower and lots of catching up.

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.


Mother of pearl in lay on pillars

sliding on the marble

inside the dome

I met with some friends in Abu Dhabi too – Muna and her charming daughters and Susanne from Jamaica; two friends from Mauritius and some Arabic school teachers from Iraq and Jordan who were eloquent and charming. Hey, remember I posted two Middle Eastern recipes – Baba Ganoush and Umm Ali? Well I got to eat them for the very first time nogal - Baba ganoush in a Syrian restaurant serving delectable food and fresh veggies and salads and the Umm Ali at a farewell dinner. It was downright lekker!! All kinds of restaurants Lebanese, Turkish, etc. And had that beautiful soup called "Addes" - we had it regularly in the Sudan a soup made from red lentils with a warm cumin aroma and taste and a squeeze of lemon juice. A glass of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice and I am good to go. The heat in Abu Dhabi was a bit much, ne, thank goodness for air conditioning and cool showers.

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