first of all, "reasonable" or "unreasonable" ?

Just came across some words by Bernard Shaw:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Asking a brave question

Below was my response to a colleague's blog post who was asked by her supervisor to reflect on why she took up the PhD study:

You asked a very important question. Why do we do the things we do? Why do we go to school, go to college, and even go to graduate school? We spend half of our lives time getting educated in various institutions and we never ask why we do that.

If we talk to today’s young college students in Hong Kong, they’d tell you very practical reasons. Have a better job, get a big fat salary, and have a well off life. I mean university education is so damn expensive, and getting more so each year. You can’t blame people to invest their precious money for very practical reasons. But if material comfort is all there is to it, then it’s very sad, indeed.

We just don’t hear young people talk about their dreams, their sense of belonging, or calls from life anymore. Have our society lost the most precious human values & qualities which unfortunately cannot be achieved or measured by material means?

What good is education, if we can only teach our students to be smarter and more skillful workers, but left them without any dreams, any aspirations to go beyond the mundane pursuit of happiness for himself and herself?

And I quote a passage from one physics professor who taught about the value of compassion in a first year general education course:

“Several students told us that they had given up on education. becoming cynical about it in high school. They learned to perform whatever was asked, even if it failed to connect to their lives, their deepest questions and most intense longings. Big jobs with big salaries were the material carrots for high performance…it took time to win them over, to reawaken in them the root of aspiration that they all have, which is not primarily about education as an instrument for wealth acquisition. Instead, it is about transformation, development, and becoming all they can be.”

-Arthur Zajonc in ‘Love and Knowledge”

Check out my new blog

Hi folks,

I've set up a new personal blog to write about my research study. I'd like to invite you all to read the stuff on it and comment. Your contribution will actually help shape our future campus development.

To give you some idea, my study is about the changing physical and virtual learning environment of the HKU campus. As you may be aware, the university is expanding and building a new campus quarter. Within that space, there will be a big area set aside for the 'learning commons', a social space that will have 24/7 facilities and resources for learning and teaching activities, and it will have huge implications and impacts on students and teaching staff. And the university is actively asking its people to suggest ideas of how they want that space to be built and look like, and what kinds of things should be included in there. I'm hoping to get more people involved in the discussion, so that we can all contribute to the development of the new space. I think we people in the education faculty will have special contributions because we know a little more about teaching and learning and what matters.

Research to empower ourselves and others

In response to Matthew's question about how to avoid the pitfall of unethical consequences of research in the education context, I think we need to start thinking about it from the most basic assumptions. And that is to ask myself, what my true motives are, and therefore what my attitude is towards the study. For example, if the motive is purely to satisfy my intellectual curiosity or for selfish personal gain, then I can imagine this kind of thinking will inevitably be reflected in the way we treat our 'human subjects'. Educational research is particularly vulnerable because our research is often on and about people, and especially on young people.

So the first thing is to examine my motive. And I'd propose here that a genuine sense of care for your research 'subjects' is the bases for an ethical research.

Dr Christopher Walsh's visit to HKU, 6&7 Nov 2007

I am pleased to announce that Dr Christopher Walsh, School of Education, Deakin University, will visit the University on 6 and 7 November (Tuesday and Wednesday). His visit is hosted by Ms Margaret M Lo of the Faculty of Education. During his two day visit, Dr Walsh will give two seminars at the HKU Constituent Theme: Language in Education and Assessment Seminar Series.

Dr Christopher Walsh has recognised expertise in the areas of transdisciplinary multiliteracies; curricula design; multimodal design/teaching and learning; and queer theory. Before working at Deakin University, he worked for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Afghanistan on reconstruction, teacher training and ESL textbook authoring. Previously, he also taught TESOL in New York City’s Chinatown and his current research, funded by the Australian Research Council, examines youth’s literacy practices in the 21st Century and learning from computer games (with Beavis, et al.). His recent publications draw on a social practice of literacy by taking into account the multimodality of students’ out-of-school literacy practices.
Academic website of Dr Walsh: www.deakin.edu.au/education/staff/showdetails.php?PERSONID=960

First Seminar: Creativity as Capital in the Literacy Classroom: Youth as Multimodal Designers
Date: 6 November 2007 (Tue)
Time: 4-5:30pm
Venue: LG02, Hui Oi Chow Science Building, HKU
Chair: Ms Margaret M Lo, Faculty of Education

Second Seminar: Critical Transdisciplinary Multiliteracies
Date: 7 November 2007 (Wed)
Time: 4-5:30pm
Venue: LG02, Hui Oi Chow Science Building, HKU
Chair: Dr Matthew Clarke, Faculty of Education

*All are welcome.

Our blog has been set up!

I would like to WELCOME everyone in the critical pedagogy group to our new blog. The idea to set up a blog was sparked off by the group's meeting on Oct 18, 2007.

In the meeting, we talked about some new research studies going on from our new group members. Topics like "deviant youth" stirred up quite a bit of controversial issues, followed by some exciting discussions. At the end, we felt we needed an easily accessible platform to carry on good and constructive intellectual conversations as well as a place to share our ideas and work in between the face to face meetings. This was how this blog came about.

Some simple instructions and guidelines:

1. Come to this blog just like you would when you visit other web-sites and blogs. There's no need to log in if you are simply browsing and reading other's stuff.
2. To post your writings, thoughts, ideas and upload pictures or files within your post, you'll need to login the blog. Press the 'Sign in' button on the upper right hand corner. Once you are in, click on the new button 'New Post' which will appear on the same spot. Everything else is pretty much 'what you see is what you get'.
   
3. You can also contribute by commenting on other's posts. Under the end of each post, there's a button 'comments'. You can probably figure out the rest.
4. Do remember that our blog is open to the public. If there are things that you don't intend for the public to read or see, then simply don't post it here. We do have control in terms of who can post or comment on our blog, so that's taken care of.
   

As you can see the rules are pretty simple. And I'm sure you'll find it easy to use after some poking around. So happy blogging, everyone!