It’s the first week of the Study Period, which means the first Zoom session with a new class. It’s not only about giving students’ brains an outline of the subject, and providing a practical walkthrough of the online site.

Whatever I say or do in that first session will help them to work out whether they can trust me, whether I can support their learning, whether I have unreasonable expectations, whether I will help them see perspectives they did not consider, will share freely or even whether I will be boring and ramble. (SPOILER ALERT: All of the above).

I am doing three different sessions for three different courses this Study Period. Today was the intro for students just starting in the degree who probably had not been in my class before. Tomorrow it is with a lovely and engaged bunch, the majority who just completed a course with me last study period. They will know most of my party tricks and greatest hits already (like “ I will give you lots of instructions about the things I DON’T care about, so that where you make the choices is the thinky work that we all care about”). I still need to explain the basics for students who have not completed my courses before… but what do we do, all pretend it is fresh?

As I gear up for introductory sessions with new students in a new Study Period, usually two scenes from films keep haunting me. Because I am nothing like them… really….although it is really tempting to tell students that they will have to pay for their degrees in SWEAT! ..

The first is from Alan Parker’s 1980 movie Fame, following the school years of high school kids at New York’s School of Performing Arts. The dance teacher outlines her expectations of her class.

The second, from James Bridge’s 1973 The Paper Chase, which follows law students through Harvard. The professor launches into an explanation of how his classroom runs, insults his students, and condescendingly tells them they will never have the right answer… Which is way, way away from what I would dream of doing…

Except, except….watching it back for the first time in forever, some of his ideas, some of the ideas about learning, are actually very similar to what comes out of my mouth, and I genuinely think this clip… first seen when I was in primary school (OK… it was a TV series too) has influenced my educational philosophy. Eeeep!

I don’t use the Socratic Method, where I ask questions on question on question to show up students’ lack of knowledge… but “I am helping you to learn how to teach yourself this subject”, and “you will learn how to ask questions” , “if you come out thinking there is far more to find out about, then we will have been successful”, and “my aim is for you to come out thinking like a l…ibrarian” all cross my lips during my intro sessions. I do not, would not, tell students, however, that they are coming in with a skull full of mush.

But these two clips make me feel like the Zoom sessions this week are kind of portentous, like I should make it a meaningful and memorable transition into something new and exciting and different …. like I will only be doing it right if I go big, set a stern and stony face, scare instead of inspire and enunciate. Every. Word.

Note to self: these commencement sessions are ONLY done right if your hands are kept totally still and clasped together, either behind your back or wrapped around a very big stick.

Busy day today, so just sharing a movie of Chiba imitating a dolphin this afternoon.

(You need to click to make the movie appear in most browsers)

The story is a little more grisly. A pigeon on the neighbour’s roof, so she was practicing her death bite by moving her jaws in the way she would, if only it would come closer.

(Or maybe she was frustrated or excited )

After 20 years, I finally added solar panels to the roof of my house in October last year.

Just before that, I used the pandemic lockdown to spend a lot of time finally turning that old bathtub, pre-dating my now-adult children, into a fabulous garden pond. I bought a series of Gedde compost bins and established a system for cleaning under the chook’s night perch and mixing in pond weed and extras from the now-revamped vege garden to get a really nice regular composting system going.

I was harvesting my own food and enjoying the colours and textures and freshness.

I’d bought and assembled a special reading bench, and added a waterproof cushion, so I could sit in the sun in front of the vege garden and watch the parrots on the sunflowers.

In November last year, I was flung into quite a different trajectory. One where my chooks, and their tiny house with ingeniously accessible egg-collecting, would no longer be part of my life. One that was exactly the right path for me, although it was not what I had ever planned.

If you have a kid with any kind of difference, you have probably been given the “Welcome to Holland” essay, attributed to Emily Perl Kingsley.

It is not one-size fits all. I share some of the reservations that Kirsten Groseclose mentions when she suggests that sometimes this Haiku from Mizuta Masahide seems more appropriate, especially when you are coping with marriage breakdown or trying to find support, or even work out what to do, when you have a violent child who you love with all your life and are also scared of being hurt by.

My barn having burned down, I can see the moon.

Expectations and plans go sideways all the time. I loved my garden that I had finally transformed after 20 years of looking out the lounge window and planning to. A 20 year plan finally realised.

I am also pretty happy with my new garden, which is a series of containers I will be able to take with me elsewhere as things settle. A totally unexpected and adaptive arrangement. One that is only blossoming so well because of the skills I learned with things planned and unplanned in the last 25 or so years.

The first container is peppermint, common mint, perpetual spinach, broccoli and marigold.

The second container is broccoli, pak choi, five types of lettuce and perpetual spinach.

I like where I live. I like the people I have met and am settling into step with.

Same little group of women growing stronger together in the gym way too early in the cold mornings; the old Kuarna bloke who sits outside the coffee shop every morning and tells me the best places to spot dolphins; the other jetty-walkers, rugged up, purposeful and surprisingly regular – the same people turning up within a few minutes each day. Workmates, and students, and neighbours, and I am making a couple of friends slowly.

Every so often, though, I am reminded how different this interstate move is to anything I could have imagined a couple of years ago. That anyone could have imagined.

I caught up with Andrew this morning for coffee in a cafe at work, after he flew in last night. Lovely to chitter and chatter, to try to work out when we had last caught up in person, have an idea of some of each others’ back story. Reminded me of catch-ups past…in St Kilda with cake and my little kids in tow while on a family holiday just before I started a new job, seeing some random Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows one night when I was there facilitating a library Master Class, and discovered that being from a time zone 3 hours behind gave me a superpower when it came to attending really late shows without flagging.

[ Oh Good Grief! I found this pic on Flickr, and realised that not only does Andrew know my backstory, he had even met the coat that I wore today … I think I had had it for just one day in the photo, but it was obviously a keeper]

Driving home, I realised that Andrew was the fourth person I had seen in the last six months, who I had met before December.

Two of those people live here and we caught up again since I moved. One was another interstate visitor at coffee at work. But, otherwise, the move has been a rather blunt and extreme relocation.

Even this afternoon, planes coming in to the Adelaide airport just a few hours after Andrew’s landed are full of people who will now need to quarantine. South Australia has shut its border with NSW. New Zealand has paused travel with Sydney again.

I had my eye on what looks like a wonderful GLAMR community event Lake Mac GLAM 2021 , in a few weeks, but had decided I would be too busy in the middle of Study Period to attend. In previous years my curiousity and sociability would have overruled prudence, and I know I would have ended up buying a last minute ticket and somehow shuffling things about to make it work.

But now, the risk of getting stuck somewhere and not being able to move freely stops me from even thinking about it. And I will not be fully-vaccinated by then – another consideration that really spins me out.

I get to catch up with my kids when we game together remotely each week, chat and email with people interstate I have known more than six months… but as for physically sitting with people, chatting… there is really no back story, every person I meet has not known me before I was this me, at this age, in these circumstances.

Bringing beanies back into it (because it always comes back to beanies for me in the last couple of weeks), I told somebody from “back home” that I had decided I would wear beanies until August to stay warm, and I shouldn’t get any stares or feel self-conscious, because for all anyone here knows, I have been doing this since I was five years old.

There is quite a gap to totally re-make myself, or conversely, to be truer to myself as layers of other peoples’ daily expectations have been ripped away.

Whatever it is, it certainly is a far wider and more significant gap between my new life and my old one, compared to what I would have expected, or experienced, if I did this a couple of years ago.

I was hoping to have made several posts about the concept of “voice” in university study before I posted this info about a session that Kirsten Thorpe and I are doing with Andrew Finegan from ALIA on 8 July at 1:30pm ACST. You can register here.

The fortnight between Study Periods, finalising marks and creating new course outlines, materials and sites, is not the time to write anything fully formed, though…

I have spent a lot of time thinking about whose voice is represented in LIS education, and how we can do better. I put it into practice when I re-designed the foundational course for the UniSA Information Management degrees last Study Period… yes, as I was delivering it. I still have a long way to go. I wrote about some of the ways I made space for diversity, when I redesigned the course, for the July ALIA Incite supplement.

As I said a few posts back, by voice, I mean when an individual communicates:

• information and knowledge
• how they understand that knowledge
• how they use it
• how they express themselves and live their lives through their knowledge
• how they take up space, both in the conversation and in the room where conversation is happening

It’s metaphorical. In this case, the room is the learning space of the course I am teaching.

All sorts of voices are there.

Mine, as lecturer, is traditionally the focus. I want to do all I can to change this. Even the job title – lecturer – implies “talking at”. Historically, lecturers were the people who had three things; access to printed texts that others did not have, a literacy level allowing them to read them, a platform (literally, a raised wooden dias) where they could read these texts out loud. Students were there to take notes of the texts that were read aloud.

With a literate set of students, and a focus on critical thinking and application of knowledge, my voice as lecturer to communicate knowledge should take a back seat to other voices. There is no reason for me to summarise and read aloud the works by others who are speaking in their own voices.

Helping with meaning-making around those voices? Yes. Condensing what I read into a number of bullet points, pre-digesting them, popping them on a Powerpoint slide, then spitting them out one after the other at passive students? No.

I see my role not as being a performative “sage on the stage”, no matter how much my students expect me to rain down wisdom from on high and fill them like empty vessels.

I want to explore how to help students find and develop their own voices as professionals, within a discipline, and as people with the graduate qualities my university aims to instill.

Anyone who has spent more than half an hour with me, or been taught by me, will know that my focus is not on stuffing student heads with facts, but on making sure students have a better set of questions at the end. That they realise there is so much more to know about the topic, but they come out with basic concepts, vocabulary to find out more. They know where to look. What the disciplinary discussion has been about, the main conversations, what has been covered, tried, thought about, argued about. Why the topic is important. How it fits in with the rest of the discipline.

But, this Study Period, I realised I could be doing far more to also help students to ask:

• Whose voice is not here?
• What damage have we done by the way we have been doing things as a discipline?
• What do the voices of those impacted by this damage sound like? What are they saying?
• What can we do to make that better ?

That is what I have written about in Incite and will be chatting about with Kirsten and Andrew.

If you have any questions or talking points you would like us to raise, the feel free to comment, ping me on Twitter, use the contact form on the blog…then I can take those with me into the (what will be too short!) 30 minute session.

Unless you think that LIS courses do have enough space for diversity, and have absolutely no suggestions about what we could be doing better…. No need to add your voice then…

So. Very. Tired. And. Not. Finished. Yet.

Great whooshing deadline whooshed past this morning, and I am consoling myself that I am doing the university teaching equivalent of living in a house while renovating.

The roof was already leaking, and the fix I am doing will stop us all getting quite so soggy. My choice is between staying soggy for another few months, or getting something that I had patched at the start of the year re-patched. We wait a couple of days longer than I would like, but we will all have drier feet for the rest of Study Period.

Translation : An assessment that I part fixed in January ..during university closedown while I was camping in the middle of moving boxes….had pain points for everyone, and re-writing it before publishing my course outline that was due this morning means that it will be easier and more useful for student learning, easier to mark and more relevant to the course material. But there is a LOT of double-checking and anticipating what students will ask about if it is not specified. Word counts for everything. Checking for any ambiguities. Spelling it all out clearly, then doing so in French, German and Swahili just in case it was not clear. Doing database searches to ensure the library has access to resources to support it.

Still feel bad not to be Super Duper Woman.

Anyhow, in the middle of head down, bum up, the postie delivered this amazingly coloured, lightweight, super-warm red woolly beanie/muffler/mittenette set from my friend and lifebuoy Tania….

Cannot say how grateful and delighted I am… lots!!! Just what I need to fuel my new beanie addiction.

Today’s post is a page from my journal with a question/challenge for readers…

I am about to hunker down in a big creating/making/writing/configuring whirlwind for the next 48 hours or so…

Academia suits my work style – where I can keep going until a job is finished and I am on a roll.

It doesn’t quite suit my leisure style, which involves actually having some.

This new gig involves three 10 week teaching periods in a row, with about a week inbetween to prepare for the next teaching period, so I KNOW it is atypical, and that I will not be skipping weekends and sleep after September. It comes with being new and setting things up. Never, ever, ever again will I have such a merging of work and me-time.

All the things students need from me are due this Monday, so I am working through this weekend right until the last minute.

Today’s blog post is just a snap I took on my beach walk this morning.

For BlogJune 2021 so far, I have posted a picture of the rainbow succulents at my door. And of fairy mushrooms. And the ocean.

Today, life presented me with this mashup – a succulent garden with a fairy mushroom next to the ocean…

So, the federal government has announced that AstraZeneca vaccine is now recommended only for those over 60.

And I am under 60. And had an AstraZeneca vaccination last Friday. And the extremely rare blood clots typically occur 4 to 30 days after vaccination.

How do I feel right now? Disproportionately anxious. Calm and accepting of both my decision to be vaccinated and of any outcomes.

The anxiety is caused partly by being just another person in the middle of a pandemic with all the history we have all had, although having got off more lightly than most. Partly caused by a personal history with hospitals and medications that have harmed people I love, where I noticed things the medical staff did not. Things that changed outcomes. Medicines later withdrawn from the market.

Back then, I was left hypervigilant for months afterward, disproportionately alert and feeling like if I let my guard down, if I stopped trying to make sure everything was OK, then I could not trust that there were systems in place to take up the gap I left.

How do I know this? Because I held a one-person workshop at 3am a couple of nights ago, trying to work through why I was awake instead of resting. I would not even be posting about this now, because it was kind of embarrassing to be awake like that – not worrying, not really ruminating, just awake … if it wasn’t that the safety advice about something I had just put into my body changed yesterday.

At my most dramatic yesterday, I was thinking of this period, for the next month, as though I have a timebomb inside me. Is there something happening in my body of which I am unaware, that I should be aware about? Should I be watching? Monitoring? What? If you have ever gestated a baby, one who you cannot really feel in those early weeks, then watched the squiggly little human inside you on the ultrasound, you will know how huge changes and activity can happen in your body while you are totally oblivious.

So, I have visceral pre-programmed anxiety about this that I really just need to ride through. I am not, however, going round the bend in any way. Yes, there is a background, physical and chemical flight-or-flight response happening. I am just watching and accepting that there is some monkey business that my brain wants to do, but I am generally in a calm place and very much OK with my decision to have been vaccinated.

Why?

Take just one minute to watch this, then come back.

Episode 2 of “Tick F***ing Tock” , at 49:00 to 50:38, broadcast on ABCTV 9 October 2018. https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1718H002S00

If you are geo-blocked, or want me to explain, it is a monologue by Tim Ferguson at the end of a two part documentary about touring a comedy show throughout Australia and to the Edinburgh Festival with Paul McDermott and Paul Livingston. Tim has Multiple Sclerosis, has been dealing with the symptoms since he was 19. The show is about disability, mortality and about confronting and reconciling it.

He points out that when the audience leaves, somebody who was in the room will be the first to die. He jokes that it will probably be him, but someone will be the second one. And this is reason enough to change your life, do what you always wanted to do, because the clock is running on all of us.

Any timebomb from vaccination is really no different than the mortality I have lived with since birth.

I will bet that all the other 50+ year olds who were recently vaccinated were not cowering or ruminating about whether they would be in a car accident on their way there. I wasn’t. I am not sitting in my front room trembling about whether I will be struck by lightning if I go outside. When I used to fly, I was aware of DVTs, and made sure I walked around the cabin. I eat carefully, but really am not too concerned about choking. All these things are far, far more likely than me having a fatal blood clot from last Friday’s vaccination.

But, what about the long term risks being unknown? Shouldn’t I worry that there is a timebomb sitting there that may impact in 5, 10 years?

COVID-19 changed all our lives. We’re not going back. Whatever happens in my body as a result of vaccination is just one of the consequences of a pandemic we are living through and adapting to. I don’t know the long-term outcomes of having COVID, or whether there will be new and different pandemics to face. If we keep our eye off the ball with climate change for too long, I DO know that a timebomb ticking under our noses will go off in our faces.

What I do know is that Long-Haul Covid exists. It impacts people for months afterward, disproportionately to the severity of the initial infection. My vaccination makes it less likely that other people will get that.

COVID mutates when it spreads quickly through a population. My vaccination makes it less likely that it will have a chance to do this. It buys time for science to work toward combating variants.

Yes, for the next month, every little sign of gas will be greeted with disproportionate terror “Oh my goodness, is THIS abdominal pain? Is it a blood clot symptom?”, but if you will excuse me, I have a very scary bowl of muesli that I am off to try to swallow without choking…