Autumn 2004

Talking English

Why professional associations matter

Being a member of teaching communities has been of immeasurable benefit to the professional life of JAN TURBILL. She would like to see more teachers joining professional associations.

WHEN I RECENTLY became president of ALEA (Australian Literacy Educators’ Association), a friend and retired colleague from my teacher college days asked, ‘Why did you take that on?’ I replied, ‘When I was floundering in my early years of teaching, professional associations came to my rescue. I have learned so much from the journals, magazines, the conferences and from other likeminded teachers, that I felt it only fair that I put something back’. It sounded rather altruistic at the time but since then I realise there is another related reason. Numbers in all professional associations are dropping. The younger ones entering the profession are not joining the professional associations and I wish to spread the word.

Developing an identity that values constant professional interaction and learning is paramount in the growth of any teacher. Such a professional identity is strongly enhanced by being a member of a professional community.

Reflecting on the ‘beginnings’ of my professional identity

Recently I returned to my old ‘stomping ground’—Wagga Wagga Teachers’ College. I had fond memories of the place—the buildings, the rose gardens, the lectures and most importantly, the sense of community.

As I walked around the grounds showing my travelling companion where things had been and sharing all sorts of stories, I realised that from the day I began at college, I perceived myself to be a teacher, albeit a trainee teacher. We were treated as teachers from day one; we were expected to dress and behave in a ‘professional manner at all times’. (Oh how often I was reminded of those words.)

I reflected on what I remembered about my training, what had been important. The key things I recalled were:

• The passion that many of my lecturers had for their discipline area was contagious and I took away not only content but a strong sense of the importance of teaching such content. I learnt that craft, music, art and PE were all as important as the three Rs. I was being trained to be a ‘doer’ or practitioner of the 4 cm thick syllabus of the time. While I didn’t know why I should teach certain things or in certain ways, I graduated believing that such content (as detailed in the syllabus) was important for me to teach.
• There was a strong sense of community. I was a member of a section that stayed together for all our classes. I was a member of a sports team, a boarding house and the Wagga Wagga Teacher Training College. We had a college emblem, a college blazer and weekly assemblies. We had musicals and plays.
• I developed a growing sense that I was a teacher. My regular visits to the demonstration school, my practicums made me feel part of the profession. I was paid—a meagre amount—but it was a salary, and I knew that at the end of the course I would teach somewhere in NSW.

My professional identify as a beginning teacher

When I graduated I already had a strong sense of professional identity. I felt confident about myself as a teacher.

• I was a practitioner who taught given knowledge, using given teaching practices guided by a given syllabus.
• I had joined the largest community of teachers in NSW.
• I had a lifelong job with secure super.

However, it didn’t take long before I began to realise there was much I didn’t know. One such area was the teaching of reading. How to move a young fiveyearold nonreader into the world of books was indeed a mystery to me. This realisation was strongly brought home by the following experience.

It was week six of Term 1. I was in charge of 45 kindergarten children with no real understanding of how children learn to read. I survived those first weeks by playing my guitar, using all three chords I knew and teaching the children lots of folksongs of the times.

For reading activities, I followed what we had been taught at college. My colleague and I developed sets of work sheets. One set involved the children tracing over a ‘letter for the week’. Another involved something called ‘visual discrimination’. This required matching shapes that were visually similar. Since we had no money to buy books we prepared these ourselves.

A typical activity might look like this:

My drawing had never been my strong point so it may be difficult to see that these were all trees. The top row are gum trees, the others are Christmas trees. The children had the task of looking at the shape in the box in the left corner and following the teacher instruction.

‘Everyone put your finger on the first gum tree in the left box in the top row.’ I was supposedly teaching the children directionality, to ‘read’ the top line first and move from left to right. I would then walk around all 45 children to make sure each had his/her finger on the appropriate tree. Can you imagine how bored they must have been? I would continue: ‘Now children move your finger along the row and take your eyes for a walk to find the tree that is the same as the one in the box ...’ We did at least one of these each day, sometimes with trees, but always with shapes that we could draw.

During week six, Gary was swinging on his chair and I began to berate him for not waiting for the rest of the instructions (even though he had finished with everything correctly circled). To this day I can still see his impish brown eyes looking at me as he asked, ‘Why we doing this, Miss?’ I started to reply, ‘Because this is reading time’, however before I finished my sentence, Gary added, ‘Reading is books. Why don’t we read books?’ And he pointed to the few little books I had on the shelf. Gary pointed at his work sheet and asked again, ‘Why we doing this? This isn’t reading’.

A good question that I could not answer; not right away. It was then that I began the practice of buying books. And it was then that I joined what was then called the Australian Reading Association and the Primary English Teaching Association (PETA). I had begun my search.

Joining a professional association was simply a further development of my growing professional identity. I looked forward to receiving the mail outs each year. However, I also began to attend the State and national conferences. Hearing and meeting other educators who were also interesting in how children learnt to read (and write and spell) became highlights of my teaching year. I had become a member of a community of learners within the teaching profession.

Over the years my professional identity has changed as my beliefs about teaching and learning have changed. My professional identity at this point of my career sees me as:

• a ‘thinker’ and a ‘doer’; not just a ‘doer’ of what others told me to do
• understanding that knowledge is socially constructed
• understanding the links between teaching, learning and assessment theory and practices, particularly with respect to the teaching of English
• understanding the role that language and literacy play in learning
• accepting that I must take responsibility for my own learning
• recognising that my professional learning is ongoing
• being an active member of an even larger national and international community of professionals in the discipline of English and literacy education
• a professional teacher.

As I reflect on the role that belonging to professional associations has played, there is one factor that stands out: namely, the sense of community, of belonging, of networking with likeminded teachers. The challenge facing professional associations today is to hook beginning teachers into realising this benefit and to nurture their sense of belonging within such communities.

Jan Turbill is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong, Australia and is president of the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association (ALEA).

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au