Like this:

I always seem to look at things from a pragmatic point of view and try to see how they would work in the workplace within a target driven organisation with limited time and resources available.  Previously I had thought that the exercises in revealing the meaning of our constructed realities, although really interesting theoretically, were just that.  I felt that this was too time consuming to be useful in practice.

But I was thinking about my Centigrade interviews and how much time had been spent, both by the pupil and myself, by them in filling in the questionnaire,  by me in reading through their reports prior to the interview and preparing accordingly and then in the interview itself.  I then thought about the story telling we had done in class and started to compare how much had been revealed about the person and what their view of the world and their place in it was from both exercises!

I now see that using storytelling or symbolic/picture storytelling can perhaps tell us more about a person using less time and resources than systems such as Centigrade, while keeping outcomes much more in the client’s domain.

I suppose I believe in the post modernist view that people should be allowed to take risks and that they will learn more if they are allowed to take these risks than if they are over directed into predictable but perhaps safe options.  As someone famous I’m sure said (but I can’t remember who!) it is in the making mistakes that the learning is done (or something to that effect!).  I suppose that is why employers now value experiences such as gap years where horizons are broadened and people gain life experience and new perspectives. 

I think it is also a generally held view in early years and primary education that children have to be allowed to determine their own limits/abilities by testing them in order to grow in confidence.  In doing that, they are bound to have the odd accident or make the occasional mistake but that is how they find out what their own abilities really are.  Perhaps the constructivist approach allows for this expansion of the person’s horizons in a way that Centigrade doesn’t.  If anything, the Centigrade system, by its very nature, limits the persons view of what is available to them.  This is fine if they already know that they want to go on to Higher Education but there are many other possibilities available to them that may make them happier which cannot be revealed by that type of questionnaire.

I felt that the Centrigrade interviews, although the questionnaires revealed a lot about the pupil through their answers, limited my knowledge of them to those answers!  Consequently it felt like I was directing them to discuss more about the outcomes of the questionnaire than about any other thoughts or feelings they might have.  The interview, while filling in some of the gaps, was focused so much on the results of the questionnaire that there was little time left to talk about any other options/thoughts they may have been having.

I keep wondering what I would have found out about them if they had instead been asked to write a story or to go through the exercise that we did with Grant in class.  That’s the first time I have sat down and thought about my life as a whole in that way and I did see unifying threads going through it that I hadn’t seen before.  Also speaking to my partner in class about her story, while making me feel like I understood her much better (even though we have already known each other for nearly 6 months) actually helped my understand mine more as well!

OK,  I had my doubts, but I think I’m a convert!

Advertisement