Beyond School

I love the edublogosphere’s international perspective on education. It helps me justify doing things against the American grain. Case in point: Cindy Barnsley and I were comparing the American Advanced Placement (AP) English Lit exam and the Australian system’s advanced English Lit exam in comments on her blog, Thinking 2.0. Cindy wrote this:

Hi Clay,
Can you explain AP Lit - is it the Seniors’ Course? Do you have control over what texts you study, or is it mandated. Education is controlled by the states in Australia and in the state I live in (New South Wales), we have a list of mandated texts for senior English courses (2 courses, Standard and Advanced) and you can choose a sequence from a set of thematic units (i.e. Journeys, Telling the Truth, the Individual in Society, Transformations etc.).
Just curious about how your coursework is structured in comparison to Australia
C.

I replied:

You’ll hate me when you hear: no mandates.

AP is Advanced Placement. As long as the syllabus is approved by the College Board/ETS (the same lovely bureaucrats who bring us the SAT) for rigor, teachers are free to design whatever year of study they like.

There is an external exam at the end of the year, so it factors into the course design. Multiple choice and timed essays. Score higher than a 3 on a scale of 5, and you get college credit for first year university classes.

So it’s basically your college “Intro to Literature” course. Poetry, drama, novels, and short stories are the focus. Lamely de-emphasizes nonfiction.

For the record, I’d much rather be at an International Baccalaureate (IB) school. Much, much more global and authentic than the US-centric AP. No multiple choice garbage in its external exams.

And Cindy replied:

You’re right I hate you - just kidding. Our course is very structured in terms of content and outcomes that have to be met but the assessment is fairly open and formative (60%) with an external summative exam (40%) with a range of writing, interestingly less and less focus on essays - more scripts, diary accounts, more personalised response - even web page design (thank god that question hasn’t come up yet because no one really knows how you do this in an exam situation). We don’t have any multiple choice so I guess that’s something. I have heard that the IB is a much better course… Thanks..

Now - look at the learning and food for thought in that simple conversation on a teacherblog. Comparative pedagogy as authentic conversation.

And adding mischief to the mix, look how that supported my response to my AP workshop teacher’s decision to give me that B+ because I didn’t include a literary analysis essay in a lesson plan:

Of course I’ll ease them into formal essays later, as you suggest. The AP exam makes that necessary. Interestingly, a colleague who teaches Australia’s version of AP tells me that Australia’s exam is moving away from formal essays and toward less academic modes of writing. Interesting “comparative national pedagogy.” The Aussies and Kiwis I team-taught with in Shanghai generally tend to favor constructivist, project-based learning. I’ve loved working with them.

If this quibbling seems childish, it’s just evidence that I haven’t changed much since high school, where I didn’t drop out, but did my own “unschooling” by skipping more classes than any student in the school’s history (I was bullied for two years, and that was the best solution I could find).

But it’s not being mischievous for mischief’s sake. Instead, it’s rebellion with a cause.
–
*Interesting context, by the way. It’s part of a longer conversation in which creating global classroom collaboration is less “flash-dazzle” and more “matter of fact,” which is the kind of normalization of flat classroom projects I’ve written about wanting to see.

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