Post Modern Maelstrom

Chief, the newly adopted German Shepard, throws his slimy Kong at my feet. Back and forth, gathering the artifacts I'll need in a day--phone, bag, keys, jacket, glasses, bangs dried okay? What next? What to say? Did I tweet in my non-sequential day?

Crimey, so I'm not a post-modernist but the dog is driving me crazy, chomping, whining and slimming his Kong. I appreciate Postman&Weingartners' Pollackesque approach to pedagogy and would like to have guys like them on my side when I start teaching. What I love about this type of investigating is that it does get you questioning and never finding an answer, for "right answers terminate thought."

See guys, like these never shut down thought which is why they're subversive. Their shtick is constantly morphing so it's difficult to pin down, and that worries those who don't like change. The need to be flexible can be threatening. And the desire for holding on to a model, a routine, a definition is comforting. Stasis is a syllabus, answering the question of the day and concluding a lesson. But if we, students and teachers, seek to perpetually keep the question ongoing, like a game of hot-potato, then the learning never stops for either player. The subversive teacher sees the terminal answer, the immovable response, as something akin to "death." As reflective practitioners, we don't want to die in our teaching. We want to keep it fresh with interminable inquiry and investigation. It only stands to "increase competence as learner".

If I were to get a principal, who is rooted in a Victorian model of teaching, on board to listen to my post-modern colleagues like Postman&Weingartner, I'd have him read "Interactive Professionalism and Guidelines for Action". Fullan and Hargreaves propose more or less the same ongoing question and desire to stay "a learner". But they aren't as stylistically inaccessible. They don't require a degree of hipness to get what they're saying yet their message is every bit as subversive and fresh.