| I: | So you do integrate other activities even if they might not be related? | |
| T: | Yeah, I think that everything is related, you know, like even like when we were at [location] on camp, a lot of it was group skills, social skills, all those kind of skills, which don’t really feature in the literacy and maths equation. Often if people find being in a group hard, then it’ll be difficult, but once they are accepted and they feel a sense of acceptance of being who they are within a group, then the likes of our programme, then something shifts in them, and they can learn in a way that I don’t think they could perhaps before. Because they didn’t have that sense of belonging or something like that. Like one of the women, she suffered since she was five years old from [condition], which is hair-loss, with women, and she often wore a cap so you didn’t see her hair. When she first came it was quite patchy and she sort of had bald patches, and she had quite short hair, and I noticed that when we were in the pools that, she’s got, hairs growing all over her head. And I said, ‘your hair its growing back,’ and she said, ‘yeah, it’s because …’ I wish I could remember her exact words, ‘it’s because I’m on the course and I’m learning new stuff,’ and I said to myself, ‘gosh, if what we’re offering, what we’re providing here, if I could claim that credit too …’ You know that it was helping her hair grow back because she attributed it to trauma in her life ‘cause a lot of people who come to us have suffered immense abuse and trauma, so if we can make a difference like that. | |
| I: | So part of what your role is as a tutor is to create that? | |
| T: | Yeah, and often I find too, when I’m sitting with students, before
they settle down to do work like maths or whatever it is, they’ll
sort of off-load a little bit, what’s on top for them, that might
have been something in their childhood or it might have been something that
happened last night. And often sitting alongside someone and being there
and listening - I think is like a fundamental thing for me anyway and the
work I do. It really facilitates something for them, so that they can then
move on and work on that maths because that’s been hurting and sometimes
it’s issues people might need help with, they might have a form from
WINZ that’s been really worrying them and they can’t fill it
out, and I say, ‘we’ll work on it,’ you know, ‘I’ll
help you with it.’
So it’s sort of filling the gaps, and it’s that whole broader picture, helping people who have I think been, haven’t felt empowered to participate in the community, to you know, to help that sort of thing happen I guess. If people have got major issues then we have professional counsellors that we have access to and very quickly we can refer them, if I can see it’s a bigger issue, then I’ll say, ‘do you think you need talk to [counsellor] about that?’ |
While there is little doubt that these literacy, numeracy and language teachers offer considerable support for their learners, this support needs to be balanced by also challenging learners in order to promote learner gain.17 The tension between support and challenge has been well explained by Daloz (1999) who stresses the importance of achieving a delicate balance between supporting and challenging learners as shown in the diagram below (op. cit., p.214).
17 This tension is sometimes expressed in terms of cognitive vs. affective domains of learning. The affective domain includes values, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, motivation and interests, while the cognitive domain includes all intellectual processes: comprehension, recall, application of principles and analysis and is often related to Bloom’s six-level taxonomy (Cranton, 1989).