A journey into learning

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This is part four in my series of posts on how I arrived at the decision that I could not stay in the UAE without jeopardising my personal-professional integrity.

Photo from Flickr by DennisSylvesterHurd

Reason 4: I want a real life PLN as well as the virtual one

Caveat: Yes, there’s learning everywhere, and everyone you meet along the way can contribute to your learning curve. It is also true that I’ve met some fantastic educators in the UAE.

Although PLN-theory and research have yet to catch up with what is happening in the real world - to make sense of the amazing improvement in the interconnectedness of educators across borders, age groups and disciplines - it is my gut feeling that one of the conclusions of the research will have to be that a virtual learning network is best complemented by having a real-life one at the same time.

The shared space and time is an essential component of one’s professional awareness and development. There is nothing to compensate for having a chat after a long and frustrating meeting, going on a bike trip with students and colleagues during the summer holidays, putting on a teachers’ play at a school party. Fooling around when possible and being serious when necessary. Is it tiring? It sure is. Is it fun? Definitely. If there is one aspect of schools that I like, it is the enormous sense of belonging, the sharing of good times and coping together with the hardships.

My virtual PLN does not only consist of educators. There are thinkers, musicians and poets who contribute to who I am, what I think and how I feel. Every experience is a chance to learn, it’s a fragment of a story, and our life is spent inserting these fragments of other people’s stories into our own, thus creating our own story. Well, living and working in the UAE has failed to provide me with the professional bonding I had wished for.
Whose fault is it?
I am sure I could and should have done a lot more. I let my general negative attitude prevail. There are are some amazing educators I am very happy and honoured to have met (some of them through the virtual PLN) and I do regret not having made more effort to find the inspiration that’s there.
My bad luck is that the actual learning and teaching environment didn’t prove to be inspiring and I projected that experience to the rest of the country. There is a lot of good will and hard work going on in this country and I applaud every educator who doesn’t take no for an answer and plods on, trying to make a difference.

Education is a precarious business: everything depends on who you end up dealing with. A good teacher can sow the seeds of a life-long love
affair while a bad one could have made Mozart hate music.

I don’t know if there is any research into this but I think that foreigners working in the state education system abroad are a unique bunch. The longer they stay, the more they lose their relevance. I think the UAE education reform is headed by Westerners whose knowledge at the time they were hired was superb. They sincerely believed that they were agents of change. Slowly, as the weeks-months-years has gone by, many of them lost touch with the trends and developments. More depressingly, though, they have lost the belief that they can and have to be agents of change. They turn into complacent bureaucrats and become instrumental in maintaining a system that is flawed – to the detriment of their students and to society as a whole. Even the government media have to admit that the public system fails the students and forces parents to choose private schools if they want to provide their children with a relatively acceptable level of education. There is in fact a fascinating discussion about Emirati students flocking to the private sector with the hope for a better education on one of the most visited, though heavily moderated, forums for the expat community in the country: forum. That this topic has had more individual visits (4769) than any other thread (apart from a heartfelt request for spiritual support) indicates how grave this issue has become.

So yes, I miss acting in my colleagues’ plays, listening to another colleague singing Jewish pub songs from Odessa, shivering in soaked tents after cycling 100 kms in the rain. And still, there is so much more that a real-life PLN can offer.

Today’s question:

What is your real-life PLN like?

Is it important for you to have one?

Photo from Flickr by: Urijamjari

100 Essential Blog Posts for the First-Year Teacher (onlinecollege.org)
Huff TV: Arianna’s ‘Get Schooled’ PSA (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)
Schwarzenegger Signs Major School-Reform Package (huffingtonpost.com)
A Renewed Emphasis on ‘Hands-On’ Education (kitsapsun.com)
Education: looking back, moving forward (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
PUNCH: Obama to Expand ‘Race to the Top’ (blogs.abcnews.com)
Professional Learning Together (angelamaiers.com)

Tags: farewell

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 23:50 and is filed under (Not) Teaching in the UAE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “My 5 reasons for leaving the UAE – reason 4”

January 22nd, 2010 at 19:06
Anne Hodgson says:

Just skimming through your last entries and the links you’ve posted,. Hope you find a far more rewading community, or can help build one, in your next position. When are you leaving?
January 22nd, 2010 at 21:29
tamaslorincz says:

I know. It got a bit out of hand. But the end is close.
Thanks for coming back, Anne.
We’re leaving on 18th March.
Have a great weekend.
January 25th, 2010 at 17:54
Andy Hockley says:

Hmmm, this is the one of your 5 which I think is (possibly) misplaced. What I mean is that it strikes me that the UAE is a good place to connect with like minded professionals, as the country seems awash with them. And just like with a virtual PLN, surely you get out what you put in, and if you get involved you’ll get what you need in this area.

But what do I know? I live in Csikszereda, a town where almost nothing even happens

Good luck with your move and hope everything goes well.
Andy
January 25th, 2010 at 19:47
tamaslorincz says:

Thanks Andy

I think I did admit in the post that I could have done more to connect with like-minded educators and it took me too long to discover the great initiatives that are going on in the country.

The reason why I didn’t make much effort to extend my PLN previously was that I didn’t feel that my learning could have been put to much use, and my negative perception of the situation prevented me from doing more.
Yesterday I had a well-received Pecha Kucha with some great teachers, in a couple of weeks’ time I’m giving a talk at a TESOL Arabia event, and in March I am presenting at the annual conference.
A bit too late and not too much, but I am trying to make up for the missed opportunity. Unfortunately this is more for my own benefit than for the community’s.
Let’s hope at the next stop it will be a more mutually beneficial arrangement.
March 9th, 2010 at 00:19
Education Tay says:

As with any learning environment you require to choose the right one for you and your teaching. The UAE is not for everyone, although the UAE has a lot to offer. University, college and especially schools range from very well run and good education to schools that could do better, such as in the UK. The UAE has learning environments that are advancing and enhancing the teaching and learning experience and we can not expect all schools, college and universities to provide world class education from year one. Takes time to progress. The culture, local environment and you as a teacher all go into your success as a teacher and stable work life happy balance in the UAE.
April 19th, 2010 at 07:49
Barbara Bujtas says:

Real world PLN? That’s interesting…
It was about a week ago when I thought I was/am lucky that I don’t work in a school staffroom. My staffroom is basically my virtual PLN, which is fully customizable, not like a real-life staffroom. However I have a tiny component of real-life PLN, that is my occasional taking part in ELT conferences, workshops and also I am a correspondence MA student of ELT, so weekly I have the chance to meet flesh and blood teachers. (I mostly work as private teacher within the realm of the dark “shadow-education”.)
What makes me pleased with my circumstances without a real classroom? A real staffroom as I experience is often full of embittered passivity, self-pity, complaining about “today’s youth”, so on, sorry to say that.
With the virtual PLN I can just filter out non-inspiring elements of a staffroom, I have built up a(n idealistic) picture of education that makes me work harder, be more creative, etc…
On the other hand the most influential, really powerful sources of inspiration for me has always been those face-to-face, real-life experiences coming through personal encounters. Thank you for reminding me of that.
Hmmm, .. but I would still opt for the way I do it now.
Anyway, thanks!
April 19th, 2010 at 12:29
tamaslorincz says:

Thanks for this great comment, Barbara.
I love my virtual PLN, to be so close to people one has never met and share feelings, opinions with like-minded people is what is missing from many real-life work environments. But conferences, training courses and real-life events offer great opportunities to experience the power of F2F interaction.
Two weeks ago I was in the UK where I met some of the great members of my virtual PLN for the first time and it was the most inspiring experience.
Last weekend I was at a conference in Budapest and I saw people I used to work with after an absence of over 6 years and it was great to be reminded that those slumbering relationships were revitalised by a single conference.
I think more communication between the virtual and the real PLN makes both of them more meaningful and stronger.
I used to have colleagues who were on twitter and I got to know a lot more about them and the way they perceived teaching through their tweets than at any of the PD workshops at the school, and our real-life conversations also greatly benefited from our ongoing virtual exchanges. One of the things I really regret is that before I left the UAE I didn’t manage to get more of my colleagues on Twitter, I think it would have made the RL exchanges more meaningful. This is definitely something I will do when I start working in RL again.
Thanks again for your comments.