I don't blog much about my personal life. I probably should do more. Anyone who stumbles across this blog needs to know about my adventures in sewing, right? After all, draughting my own patterns is pretty exciting.
But what I have been thinking about lately is edupunk and my personal philosophy. I remember at teacher's college having to write soooo many essays (thoughtfully packaged by my lecturers as "reflective personal narratives or somesuch) on my personal philosophy of teaching, my thoughts on my subject specialities, and how I planned to integrate these into my teaching practice. Even though everyone loathed these, I found them really useful. What follows, obviously, is not something I shared with my lecturers.
I spent large chunks of my late teens and early to mid twenties in punk, grunge, fringe and freak subcultures, from the swamp-garage, industrial noise, punk-metal and punk bands I saw (and the one I played in) in Palmerston North and Hamilton while at university, to the niche, almost desperate, punk underbelly of Wuhan, China. A huge part of this was the idea that everyone can create, one way or another. We can reappropriate, recycle, subvert, satirise and reclaim ideas and knowledge. These things aren’t the exclusive domain of faceless systems. We can do it ourselves – make noise, make art, make community.
I also spent years involved in politics, from student politics and processes to the National Executive of the Green Party. I learned about democracy in all its guises, learned about structural inequality, privilege and cultural capital.
I thought long and hard before getting into teaching, worrying about how I would reconcile my roots-punk sensibilities with the rigid goalposts of Aotearoa-NZ’s examination structure. When I took the plunge, it was with the firm intent to take what I had learned and keep the ethos of doing it yourself, keeping it local (while thinking global) and integrating a rogue random-organic mindset into my teaching and continued learning. Oh, and lets not forget the activism.
If I look at the key points of punk, the things that stick out for me in an educational setting are subverting corporate models of education (including the nasty fringes of human capital), avoiding bite-sized ideas learned as the educational version of chicken nuggets (just as processed and devoid of nutrition) and embracing praxis, that loop of action and reflection.
This is the one I chose for myself, to add to our art collage that will go up on my wall. Students will choose the ones they like and add an annotation about why they chose it. It could be really interesting, I think, and the students might learn something about themselves and each other - and an artist they might otherwise never come across.