Measurability
and The story of the man who smiled
The story I want to tell you about a craft class I
taught in a local Care Home where we would engage one morning a week with sessions
on sewing, drawing, pastels, still life, working from memory photos from the
1930’s and 40’s, and even paper making. It was a shifting population and
residents moved in for assessment and out back home or into residential care. All
the projects had to be completed in one lesson. Some students I had every week.
One old gentleman in particular, very nicely turned
out but who never spoke and often looked depressed and sad. And he would need huge
amounts of encouragement to attempt the crafts each week. Always crumpled his work up and threw it in
the bin at the end of each session.
One week I had decided to do a Georges Braques
(1882-1963) themed still life and being a fiddle player, I have a violin which
I brought in and set up with some sheet music and a music stand in a still life
arrangement. When this man came in – he looked at what we were doing that day,
took a seat right next to the still life and smiled.
No one could tell me how wonderful this was, how
ground breaking, how much movement that one smile demonstrated and showed.
Perhaps I could have measured it with a ruler. Because measurement was
meaningless in this case, funding and therefore learning was demonstrated by
the evidence of a smile. It made my day and he sat down and made a wonderful
drawing, and with a very few words let us know that he had played the violin
and that he was very pleased to see his old musical friend again.
Measuring distance travelled in terms of learning
is not an easy task, tick boxes only go so far, recapping only goes so far.
Matthew Lipan in his book, Thinking in
Education (2003) says that educational measurements are …’not precise,
clear cut and technical; instead they are rather diffuse and contestable’.
The change theory ideas from (Mitchell, De Lange, Moletsane, 2017)
describe how in participatory research a ‘theory of change’ is very important,
it assists the researcher (me) and the participants (in this case elderly
members of a care home craft club) to describe and analyse issues in a user
friendly non formal way, affecting our class
and so effect change. For instance did they want more memory prompts, more ‘hands
on’ activities, more props with which to start conversations and connections to
the past?
How to describe change? For me this is a question
I ask myself, I want to change and become a better teacher and I want to subtly
alter the curriculum for my current FE students to include the elusive Critical
Thinking that can’t be tracked, monitored, measured in litmus paper used on it.
A single conversation can demonstrate change, a phrase in a diary can demonstrate
a shift in thought brought on by the tantalizing, informative, moving feast of
critical thinking.
Like the man who smiled – through props and mnemonic
associations with the violin I was able to begin to understand the context of
where a student had come from. Find this out through their stories through narrative
inquiry. As a consequence of his story I understand his past in relation to his
present which is part of his education journey story. His smile was an
acknowledgement, an affirmation, a semiotic sign of progress made, connections
reached, an acceptance of the possibility of agency within his own narrative,
even if it is just in his head (being restricted by age and infirmity).
Lipman, M., (2003) Thinking in Education, 2nd
edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Mitchell, C., De Lange, N., Moletsane, R., (2017) Participatory Visual Methodologies, Social
Change and Policy, London, Sage Publications Inc.
Image: Georges Braques, Man With a Violin, 1912.
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