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Understanding Educational Jargon
© Beverley Paine I wrote the following several years ago about how I found understanding educational jargon helpful for building my confidence as a home educator. "Yesterday I read part of the Level 1 Victorian Essential Learning Standards, a .pdf document that I had downloaded some time ago. I've always made a point of reading school curricula: it helps to know what schools are thinking about how learning happens. I'm not overly impressed by this document, but I was heartened to see the glossary. I went through the glossary and translated the jargon into language that made more sense in my life, as a mum helping her children learn.
Until I did this I found the document not only hard to read and difficult to comprehend but I felt overwhelmed at the thought of being able to meet the requirements of the curriculum. The language used was working to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach my kids. Jargon can be a very real barrier to understanding, and until we cut through and make sense of it for ourselves we can feel incompetent and incapable, and rely on others to translate it and make it assessible for us. As home educating parents our aim is to help our children become independent and autonomous. "A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." Thomas Carruthers Learning to translate educational jargon to enable us to confidently describe how our children are learning to anyone, including those that assess our home education registration renewals, builds competence as educating parents, and increases our ability to confidently access a wider range of resources. We become less reliant on others to create learning activities and opportunities that tick those curriculum boxes and begin to notice and understand the many ways our children are learning, through everyday activities and their interests the curriculum outcomes that we once considered vague and incomprehensible statements. If you come across a word in a teacher's manual, article or curriculum framework that you don't understand and can't work it out from the context look it up in a dictionary. A thesaurus might help too. Once we become familiar with the meaning of jargon we remove its power to dent our confidence as educating parents. See Beverley's other articles on jargon:
She also has a Practical Homeschooling Series booklet on the subject, called Translating Everyday Language into Educational Jargon. |
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