An activity within our in person PgCert sessions this week was to in small groups choose an article to read individually, then summarise the reading as a group, and then communicate the reading summary to another group.
The reading we chose wasn’t actually an article, but an introduction except from a book titled ‘Designs for the Pluriverse’ by Arturo Escobar. Before I can even start to unpack and reflect on the content of the reading, I feel I need to first reflect on the exercise itself.
My day-to-day practice is mostly focussed on pattern cutting and the communication, transferring and understanding of skills surrounding that – I suppose I straddle somewhere between an academic and technician.
As my teaching practice is predominantly practical, I tend not to do masses of academic reading, and it wasn’t until we were set a timer for 20mins and told to read and make sense of something, that I realised my reading skills are actually quite limited. Perhaps not limited, but a muscle that hasn’t been flexed for some time, particularly around more theoretical texts. I found myself reading the same sentences repeatedly, and the information just wasn’t going in. I had to google academic words like ‘pluriverse’ and ‘ontological’. The timer went off and I was only about 3 or 4 pages into a 45 page document. Did I really even understand the 3 pages I got through?
As we started to discuss in our small group the content and context of the writing, I found that through the explanations of the others in the group, I was understanding more and more. That 5 minutes of audio discussion provided far more clarity to me than almost 30mins of reading alone.
This activity helped me understand what learning environment I thrive best in. I can safely say a noisy one with the task of reading large bodies of text is not where I thrive. Conversations and exchange of knowledge verbally is a winner.
Introducing these conversations and exchange of knowledge into my sessions could help those students, who like me, benefit from learning from each other rather than relying solely on independent study.