Garth Boomer
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GARTH BOOMER: AN EDUCATOR OF HIS TIME — AND FOR ALL TIME Address to the AATE/ALEA national conference, Darwin July, 2014 Helen Wildash, Executive Director, Teaching and Learning Services SA Department for Education and Child Development Note: This is a written text version of a presentation containing audio, video and visual images. Robert Garth Boomer: Educator —provocateur —thinker — visionary — bureaucrat —good human being — original. I was lucky. I met him in 1976, during my third year as a primary school teacher. It was Garth who convinced me to stay in teaching. Garth Boomer had a habit of making people horribly uncomfortable while also inspiring them to think about their practice and to wonder about how to get better as a teacher. He challenged me to think hard on my theory of learning, how I applied it in my own teaching and to ask, ‘How then would I fare as a learner in my own class?’ This set me on a road I travel still — how to make learning meaningful, engaging and challenging for children and young people. I am not the only one. Consider Lola Brown’s tribute in the 1984 Editorial of the South Australian English Teachers Association (SAETA) Journal ‘Opinion’ on the occasion of Garth’s departure to take up the position as Director of the Curriculum Development Centre in Canberra. The first time I set eyes on Garth Boomer was when as an English consultant, he arrived at the door of a stiflingly hot wooden classroom at Elizabeth High School to teach a demonstration lesson to the assembled sweating company of year 10 students and every English teacher who could sneak away to watch him. Forty minutes later I staggered out into the yard, shell shocked, exhausted and convinced I ought to look for another job. The ‘model’ annihilated my fragile self‐confidence. I remember what he taught; I remember [to this day] the blackboard covered, smothered, with kids’ suggestions and comments, miraculously shaped by Garth into a cluster of meanings. ……that demonstration lesson was a long time ago. There’s not a year since in which Garth hasn’t been there encouraging us, confronting us, delighting us, challenging us and always inspiring us, perhaps mostly by compelling us to imagine doing things we’d hitherto not dreamt of… Of course, when Garth died tragically in 1993 the tributes flowed. But his influence continues to be recognised. In his recent speech accepting the ACEL SA Chapter ‘Alby Jones Award’ my colleague Paul Kilvert, former SA Education Department executive and Chief Executive of the SACE Board reflected on Garth’s influence throughout his career. AATE/ALEA National Conference, Garth Boomer Address, July 2014, Darwin Helen Wildash page 1 I can recall him coming to one of our English faculty meetings in the late 1970s and talking persuasively about what he called ‘Negotiating the curriculum’. He described teaching as the partnership between student and teacher. He said that what we should be doing as teachers was to connect with students and to be prepared to negotiate with them about how they would be learning. I can remember feeling uncomfortable at the time because he was getting me to think outside what I then understood to be the process of teaching. Through the papers he wrote, through the talks he gave, through his personal presence, Garth challenged us to focus on the student as well as on ourselves as teachers, to focus on their learning as well as our teaching, to focus on student engagement and not just student management. Preparing for this address, I re‐read many of Garth Boomer’s works — typed originals of his presentations; his own publications that, in true Garth style, resonated with the voices of the teachers with whom he worked and; Bill Green’s AATE and ACSA collections. It was a sad reminder of the educational genius that was lost to us. He had so many gripping ideas I found it very hard to select the themes to focus on in this address. I decided to pay tribute to the continuing legacy of Garth’s ideas that I think for him were four inseparable pieces of the education puzzle: curriculum, learning, teaching and schooling. But let me start with Garth’s own voice — recorded as he gave the closing address at the Australian Reading Association national conference in Adelaide in July 1991. Depressing as it often is to consider the world, the socio‐political ties that bind and global devastations, it’s important to inject a somewhat sombre note into the opening moments of this performance. Don’t be carried away by the euphoria and excitement you may feel, the buzz that this conference has given you; after the vacation, work awaits [audience laughs]. The institutions call and the struggle continues. We are in hard times, when money and imagination is short; patience must be long. In order to make struggle and survival possible, we need to make explicit to ourselves and others (in so far as we can) the way the world is wagging. It’s no good trying to seal hermetically the classroom lecture door, the society contaminates because we carry it with us. The un‐worldly literacy teacher is a sitting duck – a lamb to the slaughter, an impossible dreamer. On the other hand, don’t lose the energy, the new thoughts, the emerging imaginings that have been aroused. With nous and with support, with clear heads and cunning strategy, much is possible. Hard times? Money and imagination short? If only he knew what lay ahead… but perhaps he did… AATE/ALEA National Conference, Garth Boomer Address, July 2014, Darwin Helen Wildash page 2 A LEGACY OF IDEAS Garth could easily have moved into an academic career in a university here or overseas but I suspect that, as a self described ‘pragmatic radical’ who wanted to make things happen and make a difference, he chose to combine his intellectual work with systemic educational leadership and administration. He used this as the pathway to realising in schools his deeply held theories of learning and his beliefs about what makes great curriculum, great teaching, great schools and powerful learning that makes a difference to each and every student’s life. He believed that ‘with nous and with support, with clear heads and cunning strategy, much is possible’. Educational bureaucracies are, however, difficult places within which to work and to achieve change. But as Bill Green noted, he became an ‘administrative intellectual’ and ‘curriculum worker for the nation’ (Green, 1999). Garth gouged out spaces between politics, bureaucracy and societal pressure creating spheres of influence by inspiring others to work with him, within those spaces. As a result, he had an enduring influence on enormous numbers of children, teachers, schools and education in Australia and internationally. A NATIONALLY AGREED AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM We have, at last, an (almost) nationally agreed Australian Curriculum being implemented, albeit in some locally unique ways and not yet completely, across Australia’s government, Catholic and independent schools. Nevertheless, in one way or another, every school educator in Australia is involved in a long term change initiative that offers unique opportunities for improving learning outcomes for our children and young people. Most are well aware of the process through which the Australian Curriculum has come into being but it is important to recognise that this framing of the curriculum has deep historical roots in which Garth Boomer (and of course others such as Victoria’s Bill Hannan) played a significant role. CURRICULUM: MUCH MORE TO BE LEARNED THAN SUBJECTS Boomer had long been envisioning versions of what we now call 21st century skills and capabilities. His intellectual fingerprints were all over a 1980 Education Department of South Australia (1980) policy document, ‘Our schools and their purposes: Into the 80s’. Because our world is changing rapidly, schools should emphasise skills and processes which are transferable, develop the skills of learning to learn and encourage flexibility… In particular, the document espoused cross curriculum skills and capabilities: Literacy and numeracy Communication in all forms Skills for social living Research and problem solving. AATE/ALEA National Conference, Garth Boomer Address, July 2014, Darwin Helen Wildash page 3 There were also 11 ‘Expectations’ and considerable text on learning, teaching, curriculum content, accountability and parent engagement. By the end of the 1980s Garth had returned to SA from his national roles and was heading up South Australia’s curriculum development. In 1990 ‘Educating for the 21st Century: A charter for public schooling in SA’ was released. It contained the more sophisticated ‘Essential Skills and Understandings’ as a key element across all areas of study. Communication skills Social skills Planning and design skills Information skills Environmental skills Mathematical skills Health and safety skills Technological skills Work skills In the 2000s cross curriculum skills and capabilities of this type appeared in pockets across the nation and, although differently conceived, were referred to as ‘Essential Learnings’ in, for example, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria. The General Capabilities now made explicit in the Australian Curriculum reflect research around the world that these kinds of transferable capabilities are critical for every person throughout their life and for occupations of the future. Academic results alone are coming to be viewed as insufficient outcomes of schooling ‐ what’s needed are ‘results plus…’ learners who simultaneously develop lifelong learning capabilities as well as discipline knowledge and skills. Internationally there is little debate regarding the fundamental need for schooling to support learners develop the skills such as those identified in 2012 by OECD’s Dirk Van Damme. Of particular interest is the Literacy Continuum which makes explicit the role of language in learning across the curriculum and reflects seminal ideas Garth Boomer brought home with him from his studies at the London Institute with James Britton, Harold Rosen, Douglas Barnes and others in the early 1970s.