Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Changing the world one topic at a time: Melodie Bat

Melodie Bat is a Senior Research Fellow, Remote Education Systems Project for the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation and Charles Darwin University and Lyn Fasoli is  at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Australia. 

It’s a lonely thing, writing curriculum. You sit at your computer and you put your mind into gear and then through some special kind of magic, all of those years of teaching and learning across cultures bubbles out through your fingers and you write. You come up with fantastic activities that link people with content, that increase their skills, that feed their minds and give new hope, new power.

I wish!

It’s more like – you sit at your computer and panic a little bit inside because there’s no magic formula for this and you’ve just been asked to help change the world a little bit. Great opportunity. Wonderful intention. Good money to top up that PhD scholarship.

And then…you pause. You think about everything you know about education and about action research. You think, “Why not? This could be good.”

So you develop what you think is this amazing approach to writing curriculum that situates the learner at the center, that embeds everything you know about good Indigenous adult education in Australia, and you write. You write and you write and you re-write and just maybe you change the world a little bit.

At least that’s what I hope I did – you might need to read our paper to see what you think….

Kind regards,
Mel
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