Standard 7: Educators engage in career-long learning.

Posted on September 24, 2010 by John Ames

Artifact: Philippine Organic Harvest Brochure

Reflection: I produced this small pamphlet for my good friend whom I am involved with in assisting Philippine farmers get fair prices for their coffees, cocoa, sugar, and coconut products. Helping farmers secure money for their communities helps build schools, clean water supplies, health care and libraries. Most supermarkets now carry wide varieties of fair trade, organic products, as citizens recognize the direct value their purchases make for people in third world countries. It was my intent to start a fair trade club at Killarney school, benefiting, I hoped many students directly whose families immigrated to Canada from third world countries, as well as educate all other students about the global issues of what fairly traded goods and services means to third world citizens. Although I did not have quite enough time to complete all the steps required to bring wholesale fair trade products into Killarney, I did meet with the purchasing manager of Killarney’s student run kiosk-market, CougarMart, and found she was incredibly favourable to the idea of switching the market’s goods to fair trade products. I will be returning to Killarney this autumn to follow up another project I am working on with technical teachers, where upon I hope to be able to also finish up this fair trade mini-project, whcih is slated to be linked to Killarney’s Environmental Club.

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Artifact: Ken Robinson & The Royal Society for the Arts 2010.

Reflection: I discovered this wonderful learning facility – The Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) – last autumn while researching for an in-class presentation: I’ve not been able to ignore it since and have regularly told friends and other teachers about it since learning of it. The RSA, similar to TED Talks, focuses strongly on Renaissance style learning (the United Kingdom’s version of 21st Century Learning), fusing topics as diverse as physics with literature. Although internet based, which draws certain criticism of quality sources a times, I believe in the case of institutions like the RSA, TED talks, and the Khan Academy, great hope lies not only for educators, such as myself, but of global connection – students with students – in an era previously unknown. In this sense the internet and resources such as the RSA, provide a base of community and service based learning that holds great opportunity for humanity.

About John Ames

My first Masters degree specialized in Literature and Science of the Late-Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, focusing on how scientific trends in English and French circles of thinkers, such as Erasmus Darwin (C. Darwin's grandfather) and numerous French Philosophe scientists, influenced 1st and 2nd generation Romantic literature, such as that of John Thelwall, William Wordsworth, Percy & Mary Shelley, and John Keats. In becoming a teacher I quickly became attracted to problems in special education research, embarking on a second Masters' degree in the field that continues to this day as a PhD student. During my Masters I was a Research Assistant for The Libretti of Learning: Portraits of Journeys to Operatic Accomplishment, examining how opera singers overcame learning disabilities through opera instruction: research that sparked my interest to this day. Building upon my interests in community- and place-based learning and evolutionary roots of human emotional articulation, my PhD research looks at how multimodal arts-based methods, especially children's “muzik-theatre,” may promote literacy in writing and reading for students with learning disabilities. One of my collective public aims is to create classroom adaptable training methods that will teach children the elements of creating their own short operas from conception to completion, thus promoting emotional growth through narrative development. It is my hope that through facilitating this method -- adapting one representational signing system to another -- greater cognitive understanding of writing and reading will generalize to learners.
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