Today concluded 25 years of working with TAFE SA. Some reflections on that (mostly) wonderful part of my life...
My first teaching appointment in TAFE was as a part time English
as a Second Language (ESL) teacher of night classes in the northern suburbs of
Adelaide. From the outset, coming from the school sector, I was struck by the
amount of trust I was given. Just twice in several months in those early days in TAFE was I
contacted by my manager to check if everything was going OK, and on both
occasions it was clear that it was assumed that I was a professional who knew
their job and would do the right thing by my students and the organisation.
There was a curriculum (no Training Packages back then) and it was up to me how
I taught it, what resources I used, and how I assessed students, but support
was there if I needed it. Being the kind of person I am I responded favourably
to this approach - I felt trusted and respected.
After some months I applied for a contract position on the
Education Program for Migrants (EPM) at the now defunct Kilkenny campus. I won
the position at interview (at which some people were smoking!) EPM was a ground
breaking program. It entailed English language instruction, vocational
electives held at various TAFE campuses, and a work experience program. And we
had a budget to hold a graduation ceremony that showcased students' skills and progress that to this day I
remember as landmark events . It was common for students to say "I will
never forget this day" because they had been afforded for the first time
in their new country the opportunity to display their talents in public, and be
proud of who they were.
Twenty five years in an organisation is a long time and it's
sobering to reflect on the fact that several colleagues who had a significant
role in your professional life as friends and mentors are now dead. One of
these people was Bron Davis. Anyone who knew Bron knows that she was not always
easy to work with but she taught me a lot about how to be an effective ESL
teacher and I am forever in her debt. I hope you're resting in peace Bron.
Of course the wheel turned and funding for this very
successful program was cut. The ESL program of Western Adelaide Institute, as
it was known at the time, was moved to Croydon and the Kilkenny campus was
demolished. I became the coordinator of the ESL program at Croydon and held
that position for several years. Throughout this time my program manager (of
Vocational Preparation) was Brian Jackson. Brian was a delightful man who cared
for his staff, stood up for us and the program when necessary, and just quietly
went about his business. He didn't check up on you or want to know everything
that was going on. But he too was there to offer support when needed. From the
bottom of my heart, thank you Brian. I never met your style of manager again in
ensuing years in TAFE.
It was during this time at Croydon that I discovered the Internet. I think it was 1997. I came back to work and
turned on my computer. I noticed a new icon on the desktop - a capital N. I
clicked on it and I knew instantly what it was. It was the Internet! The N was
for Netscape - one of the earliest browsers. I'd heard about this 'information
superhighway' and just started clicking. I was smitten instantly. I have often
wondered why others at that same point were not immediately smitten. I was used
to technology. I had at this stage spent several years navigating the
intricacies of Word Perfect, the precursor to Microsoft Word, and had enjoyed
learning how to exploit its more advanced functions so it was a natural
transition for me to graduate to another layer of technology.
Within weeks I was drawing on the Internet to create materials for
my ESL classes. I discovered very quickly that there were significant numbers
of ESL/EFL teachers around the globe who were putting their lesson materials
online and I happily made use of them. The next step was to organise for my ESL
classes to be held once a week in a computer room. I would direct my students
to ESL specific sites - the pioneer of them all was Dave's ESL Cafe. There I
would set students to work on the many exercises that Dave's ESL Cafe provided.
And they loved it. Even students with zero or rudimentary computer skills would
work diligently to complete the comprehension and fill in the gap exercises.
This was the first occasion when I saw students who wanted to continue the
exercises after the lesson was over
and I would have to reluctantly insist that students shut down the computer and
vacate the room!
The next step was to contact actual students who were online from
various places around the world and initiate live chat. I remember the first
time a student, disbelievingly, typed some introductory text into the little
chat box. We waited and watched and some seconds later some student somewhere
in the world replied! My student looked at me speechless and I had to tell them
that there was someone online at that very moment willing to talk with them. A
magic moment.
Another part of the site allowed for students to leave their
details as part of a basic profile that included an email address. After
introducing my students to email via basic conversations with me, some felt
brave enough to compose an email to an unknown stranger. Annie from China
was one who was keen to try this out. I set her up with an email address and
she sat at the computer ready to type to someone. Before she had typed a word
she looked up at me and said, "Is this typing or talking?" Another
magic moment! She had realised instinctively that she was about to embark on a
new form of communication for which there were no rules - a new genre if you
will. I told her it was a combination of both. Something else I have often
wondered about is why some people instinctively 'get' this Internet thing -
Annie knew she was on the precipice of something brand new and exciting.
Some students of course struggled with the writing requirements of
this kind of Internet contact, and the next magic moment in my early days of
Internet exploration with low-level ESL students was with an Iranian student.
She was from Tehran and I guided her through the process of using a search
engine (it was Lycos!) to search for pictures of Tehran. Happily we found some
- we found a site that even provided full screen images so we clicked on
a full screen image of a street scene in Tehran. What happened next was nothing
less than profound. She was suddenly silent as she gazed at the scene on the
screen in front of her and then managed to utter "that's my city."
With tears in her eyes she just sat there gazing at images of home. This was
the first time I realised the incredible power of this new medium.
So began my love affair with the Internet that completely
changed the direction of my career from ESL teacher to Internet and Education
specialist. It was around the year 2000 that I was 'tapped on the shoulder' by
Deb Bennett and asked if I would like take up a position as a Professional
Development Officer in Online Education for the newly formed Online Education
Services (OES) unit. I accepted the challenge and reluctantly relocated to a
new office in Adelaide TAFE. It was a hard decision to leave the safety and
camaraderie of ESL teaching but it was one of the best I ever made.
At that time TAFE SA led the nation in online learning, due
largely to the vision and foresight of the manager of the OES unit - Neil
Strong. Neil had quite deliberately
assembled a group of people who could take TAFE SA forward in this new and
exciting area. Before long my working
life in TAFE became one of a gypsy. Whereas at Kilkenny and Croydon I was
located on one campus year after year,
my life became one where I, together with Doug Purcell, would visit and
run training sessions in WebCT on several different campuses a week. This
included country campuses. Quite frequently Doug and I would set off on road
trips and visit campuses in the Riverland, the mid north, and as far as Port
Augusta. Further afield we took planes to Lincoln, Whyalla, and Mt Gambier. On
all these occasions we would arrive at a regional campus and announce,
"We're from the government and we're here to help you." It became our
standing joke, but we loved every minute of travelling far and wide across the
state to assist lecturers in the new world of online and elearning.
CONFERENCES
Such was our profile in the Australian VET sector WebCT entrusted
us with the planning, coordination and hosting of national WebCT conferences
for our part of the world. So the next stage of my TAFE life was to work
closely with Deb Bennett to coordinate a program for these conferences. These
were incredibly successful events that drew people from around the country and
the whole Asia-Pacific region. The work was challenging, incredibly complex, and immensely rewarding.
The next steps in my journey took me overseas. It's hard to
imagine in these cash strapped times how this was ever possible but in those
times TAFE was a visionary forward-looking organisation that saw value in
promoting our brand overseas, and sending staff overseas to see what others
were doing and bring back that first hand experience for the benefit of TAFE SA.
Consequently I went on trips to Georgia and Vancouver to attend WebCT
conferences and visit other educational organisations.
MIND MEDIA
(Douglas Mawson Institute)
Somewhere in amongst all this giddy activity of organising
international conferences and travelling the state training staff in elearning
I became part of MindMedia. MindMedia was a mystery to many. What does it do
people would ask? Principally its job was to foster innovative practice -
remarkable now to consider that that was the brief! But we had to cover as much
of our salaries as possible. And led by the inimitable Marie Jasinski, we more
or less did. For several years we were the home of Learnscope, a national
elearning professional development program hosted by the Australian Flexible
Learning Framework (the 'Framework'). We hosted the national website (designed
and administered by Tim Cavanagh), and saw a succession of national and
international guests come through our doors due to Marie's indefatigable
entrepreneurial spirit - among them Stephen
Downes, Tom Reeves, and Thiagi . It felt like we were at the centre of
the elearning universe in Australia, and I think for a while we were. We hosted
international WebCT conferences and the national VET elearning PD program.
Everything elearning came through TAFE SA.
I've had the pleasure of working with several great
workgroups, but MindMedia was the most stimulating. As I said, our brief was
innovation. Marie J was a wonderfully creative thinker and was always coming up
with new ideas on teaching and learning. Tim ran the website, Jeff Catchlove and I facilitated Learnscope
projects and ran PD sessions, and it was all held together by the admin skills
of Jenni Chappel. (Thanks Jenni!) It was an extraordinary place to work There
were other people who were an important part of MindMedia (eg Lawrence James, Janet McMillan (the most fun manager I ever
had!) and a cast of others who came through in the course of the week. And
then tragedy struck. Marie suddenly got very ill and had to take time off. It's
a long sad story. Marie died and the unit was eventually closed as part of a
new TAFE strategy to centralise all media services into one. The rot had begun.
Unfortunately serious illness also played a part in the
demise of OES. Neil Strong got sick and had to retire, and the powers that be
began to frown on units that were going outside of TAFE to earn money and it
was discouraged. Again ironic when you consider the current climate where we
are all now encouraged to go out and create business. So the wheel turns!
KWALITY WITH A 'K'
Leftist activists of the late 1960s in America used to refer
to 'Amerika with a K' to highlight the fact that the Anerican ideal of peace
and equality was a just a dream for many. They argued that many Americans lived
in poverty and hardship, experienced daily racism and other forms of prejudice,
and that the system perpetuated these inequalities. Whenever they spelt Amerika
with a K it was to remind people of these injustices.
Let me be clear - the AQTF and the AQF are in themselves a
good idea. What is not such a good idea in my opinion, and where we have lost
the plot, is the over emphasis on assessment, auditing and accountability. In
TAFESA these processes have been regularly and stoutly defended as required by
a department we now called 'Quality.' I am sure that Quality achieved some things
of worth, but I also know that under this guise of Quality I saw:
·
an increasing lack of trust in dedicated
professionals
·
a growing obsession with assessment and auditing
·
the amount of time people had to prepare for teaching
drastically reduced
·
the amount of time needed for assessment and
reporting drastically increase
·
sometimes appalling treatment of staff
·
bullying of staff by managers
·
a noticeable drop-off in attendance at PD
sessions (because staff had no time for such things)
- all in the name of quality! I had been annoyed for some time
that TAFE had hijacked the word quality and I started silently referring to it
as Kwality, because what our 'quality system' had instituted in the name of
kwality had nothing to do with quality. In fact I could easily argue that with
the ever increasing influence of 'Quality' in our system TAFE life has had less
and less to do with quality. What I am absolutely sure of is the regard that the
organisation has for its employees is a far cry from the way people were
treated when I first came into TAFE. It is very, very sad to see.
Accountability, satisfying budgets, and passing audits is about Kwality.
Looking after your staff is about quality. As in quality of life. Kwality has
more to do with covering your butt at every turn so you can't be sued.
Around this time someone(s) decreed that the River Torrens would divide metro TAFE
into south and north. I fell out on the northern side although I had worked
across TAFE for the last 10 years. it was very strange to have to separate from
friends and colleagues across the river. I was fortunate though to be able to
continue in an elearning PD role. A little while later and the Teaching and
Learning Units for each of the three new institutes were born, and I found
myself in a workgroup of three. I found this really difficult. For about 15
years I had been part of larger workgroups that had been dynamic, progressive
and full of energy, but it's hard to generate that same dynamism between three
people. The three were Mark Hunwicks (manager), Cheryl Cox, and me. Over time
we became quite close and really felt that we were doing a good job servicing
the PD needs of TAFE Adelaide North. And then another door closed. Teaching and
Learning units were not part of the new structure that was unleashed mid 2013.
Further it was decreed that there would be no TAFE Act staff doing any PD. Mark decided to leave
in September and now I follow 6 months later. I find it difficult to see how I
fit into an organisation that appears to have sidelined the education part of
Vocational Education and Training.
When I was a novice in my early days in TAFE I sometimes
came across veterans who had been in TAFE a long time and were dissatisfied
with the way things were changing. (I guess it is ever thus!) But I thought at
the time that these disgruntled oldies would be better off leaving. They just
seemed to whinge constantly. I had become well aware over the last few years
that I had reached a similar stage in my TAFE life. I disapproved of many of
the changes and tried hard not to appear as a disgruntled type who just pined
for the old days. Only others can judge whether I was successful on that score!
I do find it hard to accept the changes. To me the only logical explanation is
that the government has embarked on a deliberate policy to dismantle as much of
TAFE as they can. All done under the guise of Skills for All. (Sorry - I don't
believe in it!)
As it happens, for the first time in my life last week
before the recent election I received a door knock from my local member. I
asked them why they were ripping TAFE apart and suggested it would be
preferable if they were open and upfront about what they were doing. Interestingly,
they didn't offer any counter argument.
Obviously I am disenchanted about what is happening in TAFE,
and I can be very critical of these changes. But I also want to say that I was
very proud for at least 23 of my 25 years here to say that I worked for TAFE SA.
I have had an amazing ride. TAFE has afforded me opportunities to develop personally
and professionally in ways I could never have imagined. It sent me overseas
several times, enabled me to travel the
state and attend conferences all over the country, and gave me the priceless
gift of meeting hundreds, if not thousands, of wonderful students and
colleagues who have enriched my life and helped me grow. It gave me enormous
freedom. I have often told people that I have the best job of anyone I know.
But times changed, and I no longer share the same values that the current
organisation espouses. In fact, I don't know what TAFE stands for anymore.
Every decision made in TAFE these days is made for just one reason - to save
money. And when that is the case you have arrived in a race to the bottom. I
sincerely hope that it survives and that people coming into TAFE now get as
much pleasure and pride out of it as I
have done.
Thank you all for your friendship and support. I loved being
your colleague, and helping out where I could. But .....as they say on reality
TV shows...it's time to go....Michael!
Farewell.
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