VIU High School principal Catherine Brazier (back left) along with foods teacher Hamish Thomson were on hand to see the creation of four students – a delicious angel food cake. In a high school with 70 students, it was gobbled up in no time.
January 27, 2016 - 10:15am
According to Catherine Brazier, it’s time to imagine an education system that creates well-rounded individuals who understand how to work together, collaborate, make wise decisions and live together harmoniously. She says what we have now falls short of that, but it doesn’t have to.
Brazier spent the last 30 years as a teacher, university instructor and curriculum developer. Over the past few decades she began asking herself some tough philosophical questions about how educators like herself approach the work of teaching. Brazier is the principal of the High School at Vancouver Island University (VIU) and is currently pursuing her PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of British Columbia.
She recently presented at VIU’s Research and Scholarly Activity Department’s Lunch and Learn event that takes place on the Nanaimo campus. Lunch and Learn offers a public venue for researchers like Brazier to share their progress. Her presentation, entitled Education is About Making a Good Appearance, stimulated a passionate debate about the moral and ethical nature of schooling and education – issues she’s been grappling with ever since she started teaching.
“After spending so many years as an educator, I began asking questions about how we treat children in schools. I became more aware of how we wound them with our conceptions of what school and education is supposed to be,” said Brazier.
“We do it with caring hearts and the very best of intentions, but I realized that most of the contemporary schooling narrative is focused on what our students are and less on who they are, and who they are becoming.”
Brazier’s frustration with an education system that tends to put academic performance over all other areas of development is balanced by her love of teaching.
“The focus of my master’s thesis was to understand the responsibility of educators to, quite frankly, give a damn about students, parents and each other as human beings and not just consider them as a means to an instrumental end. To see students not just as widgets to successfully construct and put out to the marketplace but to consider deeply the individual life-world of each child,” said Brazier.
She hopes the philosophical questions she raises through her doctorate thesis can begin the conversation around what everyone in the educational realm knows, but rarely talks about – the simple fact that every child is different.
“I’m asking people to consider each individual and how their life and experience has made them unique. Caring about students, and others, is a crucial foundational piece for me in this deeply human endeavor called education,” said Brazier.
“We spend a lot of time teaching students how to argue their case, and little to no time teaching students how to honestly understand the perspective of others. What I know is the current system doesn’t work for a whole lot of kids. I don’t have the fix for it but if we start talking about it we can start figuring out what to do about it.”
The VIU Research and Scholarly Activity Department holds Lunch and Learn sessions on Tuesdays at the Nanaimo Campus and everyone is welcome to attend.
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MEDIA CONTACT: Dane Gibson, Communications Officer, Vancouver Island University
P: 250.740.6288 E: Communications@viu.ca
Tags: Research
