OpenBadges Potential

MOOC "Badges: New Currency for Professional Credentials" - Understanding the Open Badges Ecosystem and Building a Badge System

CHALLENGE TWO: Define the Currency of an Ecosystem
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Tania  a Spanish teacher in an Auckland (NZ) secondary, undertook a year long Professional Learning course. Her focus is on improving her classroom pedagogy and deepening her understanding of second language learning acquisition. A fluent Spanish speaker who has travelled extensively to Spain and South America before settling into work and family life, she has developed a love of all "things Spanish" and often refers to her experiences as a language learner to support her students' learning experience and help them empathize with others' culture and ways of doing things, the Language curriculum resting on developing language as well as intercultural competencies for the purpose of communication.
Tania, through experiencing with Task Based Learning with expert support during her course, now realizes the importance of assessment for learning, and of providing timely feedback and feedforward to support her students' next step in their learning. This practice helps her and her students manage the evaluation of the internally assessed standards. She initially felt she was assessing all the time but now she sees her students identify their next step more rapidly. Tania also realizes the importance of providing authentic learning opportunities to motivate her students' engagement and scaffold their language learning. By authentic she understands authentic for her students, learning that will serve them in real life. Tania connects "real life" to jobs using languages. She has coffee with Ian, in charge of the school's career program and they discuss where languages currently fit in career pathways, in connection with assessment standards and credits. As always, Languages are not prominently featured, and retaining students from one year to the next can prove difficult.  It is a timely conversation though:  Ian reminds her to focus on the skills involved in learning a language, such as communication and use of technology to access native speakers for instance, and how these skills, if made explicit, have huge currency for employability.
Tania prints the "Know your own skills" quick reference published by CareersNZ  and takes it to her Department meeting. This prompts the team to revisit the Key Competencies, the "capabilities for living and lifelong learning" as outlined in the NZC. The NZC states that Key Competencies ought to be kept track off continually, monitored rather than assessed. Her school has not explicitly identified a focus on these Competencies, and they have not always been at the forefront of her and her team's attention when developing their learning programs which are articulated around content knowledge.
Yet the deliberate crosschecking by the Language team of the Key Competencies and the employment skills reveals a wide range of common vocabulary. Tania undertakes to unpack the Key Competencies, break them down in more granular skills, especially around Managing Self and Participating and Contributing, which are two competencies that develop in the unfamiliar learning context of Spanish immersion learning:  Managing Self because students need to structure their portfolio of evidence, use a range of tools to produce this evidence and meet deadlines for submission. Participating and Contributing as students must practice to be understood, and interactions in Spanish require that they are both listeners and speakers.
Tania decides on a set a key words for each competence and uses them to label the resources and activities she has uploaded on her Moodle course. She decides that she is going to track how her students develop these particular competencies for a term, as well as draw students' attention to them explicitly in her teaching, making connections with the skills they will require in the workplace.

Abbi is close to making her choices for her subjects for her final year. She has considered more than once to drop Spanish. It is tough and it requires quite a lot of self study for her to complete her assignments. Managing deadlines for submitting portfolio pieces, alongside the volume of her activities in other subjects and out of school is difficult. She finds it hard too to communicate verbally in the target language unless she has learnt a piece off by heart. But through listening to her teacher's consistent use of formulaic phrases in the classroom, she is starting to build a repertoire for herself. She is reusing some of it quite successfully now and can even provide some feedback to her peers when they are working on a common task together. Neither of them can speak English in the classroom (or else, which is "enforced" in a friendly manner by her teacher!) so she is developing new strategies to communicate, sometime using gesture, or her laptop to look up phrases, practice saying them, and then use them when interacting with others. It is really what has been keeping her in the Spanish class that, the fact that tasks require that they work in small groups, assign roles and go and find a way together to solve the problem at hand. It is a nice change from her other academic subjects where she is doing a lot of writing. Verbal interactions are captured by way of videos too, so she and her friends can make good use of their smartphone. Feedback she receives regularly from her teacher helps her decide when she ought to give recording a go. She has now worked out how to upload her video files to her ePortfolio, and she has made good use of the forum function to first ask for help and now to give a few tips on how best to do it. Her teacher recently has started to talk about work skills, and as a class they have spent sometime deciding on a set of labels that describe what skills they are actually developing in class. Since she contributed to the list, she understands all of what these words mean. A girl in her class pointed out in the group forum that Miss was using these labels on Moodle activities. This leads the conversation to the use of tags when organizing evidence of learning in their portfolio. Abbi can see her tag cloud develop and the word "helping others" and "communicating" get bigger. Her teacher has noticed she has helped others in the ePortfolio system through posting replies in the group but also has observed that Abbi is showing peers tips to access good Spanish podcasts and other resources online.  Her teacher awards her a "helping others" badge that she pins on her lapel alongside her Captaincy badge and her Service to Charity badge. Moreover Abbi can identify these two skills are developing now and can relate to this as she has recently filled in a Careers Questionnaire which indicated that if she wanted to work in Early Childhood Education (something she is considering at this stage) these skills were important to foster. Upon reading her Spanish teacher's feedback on her latest assignment she realizes the "time management" word in her tag cloud is yet to appear: her dad has been moaning over dinner at how poor at time management some of the people he employs can be. She makes note to self to ensure she will meet the next deadline. Abbi has noticed her teacher has changed her approach to delivering her lessons. She is starting to get into the swing of self and peer assessment rather than always relying on her teacher to get to her. While she would not say she is taking risks with her learning, she understands from the feedback she gets regularly that she takes initiative and is curious to learn more. Abbi might well take Spanish next year, as she has gained confidence in her ability through persevering. Some practical skills acquired along the way are developing, and are made visible as her teacher makes them explicit in her lesson outlines but also through her tagging. Abbi is starting to see the relevance this subject has with what her life may have in store after school.

Greg notices Abbi's new badge on her lapel as he drives her to school. He congratulates his daughter and asks her how come she has been awarded it. To his surprise, as Abbi usually is quite vague when it comes to talk about school matters, Abbi launches into a list of what she has done to get it, and is quite eloquent when describing how she uses her ePortfolio system. Greg is surprised but suddenly realizes that school is actually preparing his daughter for the real world.

My attempt at a first visualisation

This story takes place in a secondary school (NZ) environment where most of the learning is happening face to face in a classroom setting, with only some elements of the course delivered digitally and some opportunities to use devices. Few connections between Learning Areas are made explicit to the learner. The potential to make the Key Competencies visible, traceable and "rewardable" is being explored and it could help with this.  The teacher is the assessor, she and her students are unpacking the Key Competencies together in their unique way, in their context. This teacher is "creating a mechanism to make students learning visible" (OpenBadges for Life Long Learning, p.3), in a formal context.  The Key Competencies are "future focussed, student centered and interconnected", and school is one of several environments where they can be gained.  To move from a 'Physical badge" system to an Openbadge system would further enhanced the interconnected nature of these competencies. But first of all, the system would need to be tested with other learning areas. It may be with the in school careers' program initially as students have the opportunity to identify a career journey. This would require that Tania took risks to continue her investigation through teaching as inquiry, was willing to share her ideas with colleagues (she is already working well with her Department) and was prepared to face ambient cynicism about change and new ideas. Secondly, it could bring to the fore that the badge can communicate information about the holder which could complement the NCEA qualifications. To that effect, it would be necessary to develop consistent, reliable and valid assessment activities with a determined success criteria to issue a badge, that is valid and recognized across the learning areas of the school. This could be tested by working in tandem with one other department at a similar year level for instance. MyPortfolio/Mahara as badge displayer with Moodle as issuer  would require more teachers and students jumped into the innovation bandwagon to make use of the learning systems available in the school. Badges would have more value if used school wide and recognized for what they represent. Schools have been in the business of issuing badges to recognize achievement outside of the classroom for a long time. What needs to be established is the specific skills they each represent, define a learning path (on and offline) to capture them, to ensure that the badges represent the development of the competencies. It is a dynamic process, a living record. Students have to see for themselves what is in it for them. That will motivate them to lead the development of their own Key Competencies and encourage them to seek opportunities to earn badges. If students recognize the value of badges for themselves and for the reputation of their peers, then there could lay the most potent strength of the system.

Conversation matters

What follows is a mix of thoughts arising from reading from different altruistic online sharers and talking with a range of people dedicated to French language and culture.
The latter I met at the Alliance Française AGM held in Christchurch where I was invited to attend as representative of the NZAFT. It was a timely reminder, considering where my thoughts were at earlier in the week (as vented in my comments) that Languages must be, ought to be, have to be celebrated as a main dish on the Smörgåsbord on offer to learners in New Zealand schools. And tonight, thanks to the company I kept recently, I am even almost ready to say French rather than the generic Languages ;-)!

You are here flickrcc

My presentation at this meeting allowed me to focus on what most teachers of French do very well: they love French! Not just French the Language but also all things French. Conveying the love to dwindling numbers, through complex pedagogies which need to be given more time than seems available to internalise them, with the perceived end goal limited to striving for a credit count is at times a tall order.
Compare that to the situation of our Alliance Française colleagues whose role (apparently!) consists of teaching students who come through their doors with a self motivation, a need, a reason to learn French, free of any formal assessments, one would have reasons to be thoroughly jealous of these conditions!
Last November I had the opportunity to work alongside some of the young "volontaires internationaux" at the AF in Wellington as we were training to be DELF examiners.  I realised I had much to learn from their take on the Approche Actionnelle as well as their approach to evaluation. To my pleasure they too expressed a vivid interest in understanding more about French in NZ schools. It thus indicated that there are grounds on which to build a rapprochement in order to learn from each other. Yesterday's meeting reminded me of this and it was an opportunity to formalise a wish in public for it to actually happen. What shape it takes is yet to be devised and as NZAFT decide things at committee level, it certainly is not entirely up to me.
But just now I think I know how it could possibly be put to good use for the greater good!
And this is born of several other things happening this week:

- talking about New Zealand school teachers of French lead to talk about NZ schools, in particular the recently opened primary and secondary schools with their modern learning environment, open plan spaces and collaborative teaching aiming to have students direct their learning.  It is indeed here to stay with many existing schools embracing this approach and embarking on the journey of innovation. This was news to the French Embassy Education attaché who was very interested in knowing more. All I know is names of schools, a few teachers who I follow on Twitter and have occasionally met, but enough to understand that this is working on transforming education right here and now. What I also seem to pick from these new schools is that Learning Languages doesn't seem to feature much. It was a shame he thought and why he asked. I suggested, unsure: Teachers not ready for the leap of pedagogical faith,  new principals not ready to give it full attention while either the Correspondence school or the VLN can somehow attempt to fill that gap, not enough parents pushing to have a language taught, teaching teams fully focused on literacy and key competencies and forgetting that the cultural competence of our NZC is intrinsically linked the intercultural competence developed through language learning? Who knows?

- exchanging with you here along our last posts and comments, you describe your attempt at weaving in your new classes a pedagogy which invite students to direct their own learning is meeting with resistance at this stage. As we discussed I am surprised to read that students are so change adverse. This could indicate that it is such a departure from the usual expectations they have grown used to in the environment they are learning in,  that it will take time and continuous effort on your and their part to start to see the long term benefits of the approach.

So from this one could jump to a very quick (and certainly wrong) conclusion:
          - new learning environment, self directed learning=not conducive to language learning
          - traditional learning environment, Sage on the Stage teaching= conducive to language learning

- upon talking new NZ schools with the young AF teacher her eyes just lit up and it all seemed to make sense to her: open space where furniture is arranged to support interaction, nooks and crannies for practice in solo or pairs, breakout spaces for recordings or rehearsing, devices for listening and research, students looking for what they need to make meaning in their own term, decent time allocation to allow for continuity, having her course and resources online for students to access whenever wherever, doing on the spot tutorials when the need arise, offering specific breakouts at specific times, planning with teachers from other learning areas to incorporate language and culture where and when necessary, ... she pictured it all there and then! She got it. Which told me: French Languages can be integrated in this way if you have the teaching and the attitude right. And thus be a fully fledged item on the buffet for the curious and imaginative and risk taking learner, not just a Learning Area in the NZC!

Where am I going with all that I hear you say?
There is a need to investigate, demonstrate and reflect on how French can be incorporated in a student self directed curriculum in order for language learning to fully contribute to make learners connected to the world they live in, confident to meet others and being able to walk in their shoes in full knowledge of who they are, as well as gaining an awareness that learning is a life long journey and that languages can pop in anytime in their lives.

- of the bloggers who have contributed to this thinking is Claire Amos, a New Zealand educator whose excellent online presence I have followed for some years now and whose work has gone a long way in explaining and convincing me of the role of Teaching as Inquiry. The lady is a sharer of good stuff.  I can't say I know her but I can say she sure has the most awesome eportfolio I know of. Anyway Claire in her current position is undertaking with a team of NZ teachers an edutour of self directed schools in the US and Canada.  I have been reading with interest her accounts, which prompted me to google the schools that they are visiting . Through visiting these schools' websites I could see that Languages featured fully. Sure Canada has a different relation to learning languages that NZ has but that sure indicates that it can be done.

- which got me to contact, Jacques Cool a French Speaking Canadian whose tweets both in French and English I value highly for state of the art information. Hence I DMed Jacques this am to ask him if he knew of any English speaking Canadian self directed learning school where languages were fully a part of the curriculum. He was interested by my question and has sent it on to an expert in this field! WOW there are experts in this field! I now am truly excitingly waiting to hear back.

And then what? A little dream situation: advice from an expert + model schools to learn from + language teaching clued up AF teacher + keen to learn and inquire NZ French teacher(s) + new schools environment in NZ + Learning Language integration+ networking = being proactive in ensuring French (Languages!) is an integral part of a varied rich modern curriculum.

Now where do I start to make this happen?

Cultural, intercultural, bicultural, multicultural - 1

I am setting out here to try to debunk some stuff I am finding somewhat hard to get around. It is likely to take more than this post, so I will start here with what I am trying to do and with some resources gathered to inform my exploration.

Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching is "a set of techniques", six principles "for putting interculturally informed pedagogy into practice"

"Students build their awareness of language and culture, their language knowledge, their cultural knowledge, and positive attitudes towards themselves and others. Intercultural communicative language teaching (iCLT) encourages students to make comparisons and connections between languages and cultures" (Learning Languages Pedagogy, TKI)

In this 6 principles I recognise the following words that relate directly to Learning:
    - actively involves
    - make connection
    - social interaction
    - reflect
    - take responsibility

"The development of intercultural competencies" has become an essential feature of school education in NZ and other Western countries, and the responsibility for this falls to some extent, but not only, on languages education and thus on the Language teacher.

Statistics New Zealand, in its National Ethnic Population projections, informs us that Maori (+29%), Asian (+145%) and Pacific (+59%) populations will continue to increase their share of the NZ population by 2021 (that's 8 years away!), with Europeans only increasing by 5%. All ethnies bar Europeans will have a much younger age structure on average of NZ population bar Europeans,  who are overall getting older. And all ethnies bar Europeans will have more babies thus more children going through school. Add to this the growing diversity of cultures, backgrounds, religions and languages that migrants bring to any NZ regions (example in the Bay of Plenty) and it is looking vibrant indeed!

All of these reasons (and the specific context of teaching Languages in Aotearoa NZ) makes me want to move on with "developing my intercultural competencies" as this multicultural mix is coming to a classroom near me rapidly (or is already there depending where you are located geographically).

Source

These are all reasons why as a teacher of French,  I am not to merely transmitting information about my culture but I have "focus on raising awareness of culture and culture-in-language in the lived experience of the students and people from the target language culture(s) as well as other cultures present in a classroom or community"

 Language learning itself won't necessarily foster a positive attitude to other's culture hence the need for interculturality to be addressed explicitly and openly in the classroom.


What does interculturally informed pedagogy look like in the language classroom?

• construct knowledge through EXPLORING cultural practices
• make CONNECTIONS between cultures, and between existing knowledge of culture and language, and new learning
• social INTERACTION that involve communicating across cultural boundaries
• REFLECT ‘critically and constructively on linguistic and cultural differences and similarities’
• TAKE responsibility for their intercultural growth, assisted by teachers who, for example, foster engagement with difference and awareness of stereotypes. (Ref: Dellit 2005, pp. 26–28)

I would like to discuss this specifically to think of actions in the classroom that support this (use of some radical controversial materials to engage? role playing? online communication with native speakers? make culture explicit, open with key questions to wonder about eg: how do they do it, how do I do it, is it different, the same, what do I notice, why, what do I learn from it, what do I learn about my own culture, myself from what I have learnt? )

What is iCLT setting out to do?

"to foster interculturally competent learners who can confidently navigate intercultural interactions and relationships",

• who are tolerant and have a positive attitude towards others' culture,
• who can communicate with a native speaker without necessarily being fluent themselves,
• who welcome diversity and also are able to see some universal similarities amongst cultures including their own,
• who can confront and reflect on their preconceptions and prejudices,
• who can resolve and/or learn from misunderstandings arising from miscommunication,
• who develops a strong sense of one's own identity
  who is a cultural intermediary between one' s own culture and the foreign culture
  

So what do I do as Language teacher?

I am a French teacher who is French. "What does it mean to me to be French?" "What does it mean to be French in NZ?" "What makes me French?" "Who am I?" are questions that I am now more curious to think about. And if I am to grow a culturally responsive pedagogy, I ought to develop intercultural competences which ban assumptions, distance myself from conventional attitudes about differences, show deep interest in others' cultures, including of my students in my classroom, provide these students with the opportunity to not only eplore another culture and language but above all gain or strengthen their awareness of their own cultural and language through discovering another.

To move forward with this I need to go back and the urgency is to know my students, all of them, for who they are really.
And to learn to do that in a New Zealand context I want to turn to the kaupapa around teaching/learning strategies for Maōri learners and raising Cultural Responsiveness.