© 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.

• Product: output of human activity in form of an artefact technological product: artefact created to meet an identified need or want;
  
• Sensory perception: seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, smelling... that is, experiencing life via the senses;
  
• Technological process/technique: human activity (eg cutting, digging, shaping, usually carried out using tools);
  
• Skills, techniques and processes: ways and methods of using and handling just about anything;
  
• Manipulate: handle;
  
• Realise (ideas/goals/effects/outcomes): achieve them;
  
• Outcome: result, usually expressed as a desired result (goal);
  
• Objective: what we hope to achieve;
  
• Range of processes: use various methods;
  
• Document: write, tape, film, take photos, etc what happened;
  
• Multimedia resources: anything that includes words, images and sound; eg DVDs, internet, computer programs;
  
• Media: can be anything one uses to create something as well as the way information is conveyed to others. Arts media - paper, canvas, paints, body (eg dance), clay, etc. Information media - books, television, internet, newspapers, etc;
  
• Investigations: opportunity to create and ask questions and then work out ways to answer them;
  
• Materials: anything that can be used to make into something else;
  
• Information product: something that tells/shows others what you know using analog or digital technology;
  
• Graphic/visual organiser: a way of showing on paper how different parts relate to each other or link together - map, flowchart, graph, time-line, etc;
  
• Design brief: a statement that tells why, how, where, when and just about anything else that is necessary to help solve a problem;
  
• Design: a map that shows how we transform ideas into action and results/products. "

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:

• Why Homeschoolers Need to Learn to Translate Everyday Activities into Educational Jargon
• A Role for Educational Jargon in the Homeschool

She also has a Practical Homeschooling Series booklet on the subject, called Translating Everyday Language into Educational Jargon.