First Day on Campus

The “uni” is located on the outskirts of town, so my colleague Bernadette, and her husband Kristian who also works on campus, picked us up this morning to take us with them.  Australians tend to shorten and add a “ee” to lots of words. For example, breakfast is brekky and sunglasses are sunnies.

When we arrived, the first thing I did was look up in the eucalyptus trees for koalas. They have them there from time to time and I was hoping this was one of those times, but alas, not today.

We met some of the staff and faculty, I got some office time, but the highlight for me was attending Bernadette’s lecture. She had a 50-minute lecture and then the 73 students would be divided into two sections and have another 50-minute tutorial with another instructor named Ally. Ally is a local teacher on leave, who would be what we call a lecturer. Today was Ally’s first time teaching the tutorial, so she was a bit nervous. We sat together before Bernadette’s lecture and shared some small talk about what grades we’ve taught (which included some translation of vocabulary) and how practicing teachers make terrible students. It’s really universal I guess.

It was the first day of the semester so students were just assigned their first “professional placement,” which is 5 full days in a classroom during the fifth week of the semester. (For Chico State folks, this looks similar to our program’s prerequisite 45-hour requirement.) As I surveyed the room, I thought the students looked remarkably similar to Chico students, about half were young white women, about 1/3 of them were men (which Bernadette said was a bit higher than normal), and about a dozen of them appeared to be older students. I only saw one person who appeared to me to be a person of color.

Bernadette introduced the course “The Social Contexts of Education” which is the continuation of content they had in the first semester where they discussed their own identities as teachers. As part of her overview of how education is contextual, Bernadette showed a clip of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban speak to the UN. It’s really powerful and moving and I had tears through the whole thing. Bernadette got choked up afterwards trying to speak about it – nice to know a kindred crier.

At the end of the lecture, I turned to Ally and said, “Well, everything she just said is basically the exact same thing I teach.” And Ally said something to the effect, “Well then, after you and she are done, we can expect that the world will be changed.”

The irony of that statement is that Bernadette’s last quote of her power point, on a slide labeled “Provocations,” was “Statistically speaking, the best advice we can give to a poor child, keen to get ahead through education, is to choose richer parents” (Connell, 1995, cited in Thomson, 2002).