I have to wonder sometimes why people give me strange looks when I talk about things I want to do in my life career wise. This year I finally made the decision and took the step to do my teaching degree. I like it, the theory is interesting and being able to engage with kids and influence them in a hopefully positive way is just brilliant. Am I still just as odd and slightly immature with a large dash of nonsensical musings? Of course, I doubt this will ever change. Do I have to watch what I say around teenagers more....Hell Yes!!! I mean seriously, it's one thing to show something or talk about something that could be slightly too mature to your own cousin or other teenage family member, another to do it with another persons child that has entrusted you to educate them. I am still new to this, so, I will reserve my judgment on my abilities to communicate ideas to teenagers til I have much, much more experience. However, this is not what this is about and I have digressed a little there (see? being in a classroom has helped me with staying on topic). I want to really discuss the confusion that people have when you want to do cross discipline studies.
I expressed to someone today that I would love to maybe do a Master's in Anthropology, perhaps with a focus on education. I feel that Anthropological techniques and observations allow us to examine society. Home Anthropology, or the anthropological study of areas within your own "society", allow us to look at our own society as a different culture to our own. Doing observations as a student teacher, I am thinking all about me, about the actions I need to take, actions from students I need to be aware of, and importantly how to know when a teaching technique I am going to use is working and with which kind of students it will work with. Anthropological observation is different to that. We all talk about how the classroom is a small society in and of itself, we all think of the classroom as a microcosm of the culture, region and society in which that classroom is based. I don't see it that way. I see it as its own specific culture and society. It has a particular kind of environment, a very specific set of social rules you rarely see outside of it, its own style of language (both lingual and physical) and most of all it has its own form of interactions that are classroom specific. Yes, all these things are going to be influenced by the wider community with all the socio-cultural specifics of that community.
However, why is it that despite all these things that classrooms are largely all the same? We teach teachers all the same techniques, strategies and research. How can these things that we are learning and teaching be applicable if there isn't some kind of classroom specific culture? If there is, hooray, by all means keep teaching teachers in the same way. If there isn't, why on earth do we not try and actually research what these differences are? We throw around the word "variable" a lot. Almost as though the word magically means that we can't possibly research it. I feel like it is the academic way of saying that the academics have put it into the too hard basket. However, having had experience, at least as a university undergrad student, of anthropology, this use of the word variable just baffles me. I feel like I hear far too much about statistics and numbers, and yeah, in those sorts of studies it is hard to examine too many variables at once. So why not seek out a different way of doing research? A different form of observation? Why not use anthropology, the discipline devoted to examining culture and society with its myriad of variables?
I don't doubt that there is already anthropological research on education, so why we don't get given any of it in our education course is beyond me. I know there is anthropological research on childhood and early learning, and I have seen research on adolescents across many cultures. I do intend on looking up some of this research when I have my mid-year break. It frustrates me that there is all this research that our education lecturers could be discussing with us, but the only cross-discipline stuff we seem to see is with psychology. I understand that a post-graduate course in education is only one year, we have a lot to get through in very little time. With this limited time why do they provide us with references to research we will never use, telling us that we will never use it, when there is practical and useful research out there, that just happens to be in the wrong discipline for them to notice it.
I don't want to become a teacher and abandon my anthropological influence. I am certainly not going to abandon my archaeology, though I admit what I have done in archaeology is much easier to insert into my teaching as it is already part of what we know as school taught History. Anthropology I feel has strongly influenced the way I view the world. If I hadn't done so much of it in my undergrad degree would I be asking these questions? I honestly don't know. All I do know is that I want to mix my anthroplogy into my education studies. If this means doing a Masters in Anthropology at some point, in the hope to do a PhD that could possibly focus on classroom culture, I am prepared to do it. Whether I will ever do it is a different matter. I also would like to do something that crosses my archaeology background with education. Even if it is simply going through all the sources and textbooks I use in class and try and fix any misconceptions about archaeology that comes across in them.
I feel like I have made some sort of argument here, but I am hungry and need to finish cooking dinner now. If you have any thoughts on the matter, feel free, as always, to comment.
love you all (in a platonic way)
Milly
