Bernie’s education story is vastly different from that of most young people, although her experience in the middle years is a common one. She is 17 and currently in Year 12 completing the Vocational Major. Bernie has high aspirations for herself and passionately following a dream to become a Diesel Mechanic. She is not at all put off by the fact that this is a very male dominated field and feels she is well equipped for the challenge. Her journey through school has given her a strong foundation of resilience, persistence and self-belief.
Bernie’s parents did not have any faith in the institutionalised education system and made the decision to home-school all of their children. Finally, after her primary years were spent at home with her siblings, Bernie longed to attend a school and to have a broader social connection as well as exposure to all sorts of possibilities that she was not experiencing in the home setting. The leap was huge!
Bernie enrolled in a government high school in Year 7, near where she lived, beginning her education in a school. She was nervously optimistic about this but also determined to stick to her decision. However, Bernie reports that her experience in these middle years was one of the most challenging times of her education. She certainly had good basic literacy and numeracy skills but soon discovered there were significant gaps in her learning or at least other students seemed to know things or have skills that she didn’t. She felt she was on a different wavelength to most of her classmates but did not find the support from teachers that she felt would have helped her to adjust more effectively. Bernie remembers a time in an English class, “we were given a text response question and told to write an essay discussing the topic. I tried to explain to the teacher that I didn’t understand the task but I felt she dismissed me as being lazy or trying to get out of the work. I didn’t get the support I needed but I was unequipped to communicate that.” Bernie realised that there were gaps in her knowledge but found teachers just presumed students knew things and didn’t follow up those that didn’t. She sometimes heard comments like, “what do you mean you don’t know that? You’ve had 7 years of primary school to learn it!” Communication with teachers was hard for her and looking back to her middle years experiences she thinks this is key for young people to feel more connected at school.
Around this time Bernie said she struggled to focus and often couldn’t sit still in class or focus on prolonged tasks. Bernie reflected that it wasn’t just her foundation experiences that caused her feelings sometimes of discontent. She loved working towards an achievement or undertaking learning that meant something to her. However, the work that was often offered to her and her classmates seemed to have no relevance to them; she couldn’t always connect with it. She says she really wanted to do well and achieve. She wanted to prove to others that attending her local school was the right thing to do. She wanted to be happy and belong but found herself missing days and withdrawing.
Bernie especially found Maths confusing. She said she often wasn’t able to visualise concepts and kept missing steps that would have resulted in success. She found the pace of learning challenging. Bernie commented that “even if I hadn’t grasped the essential learning of a particular concept, there was a test and then we moved onto to the next topic” She reflected it was a strange way for students to learn. Through sheer determination Bernie started to master the basics though often found this cognitive load exhausting. She reports she finally had a teacher in Year 9 who took a personal interest in her learning and helped her to structure responses and organise her thought processes so that she started to achieve better results in this subject area.
Bernie was very clear that sometimes the work offered in most classes in these years was very one-dimensional. She explained this in simple terms. When new topics were introduced or assessments were delivered there were few opportunities for students to explore options to demonstrate their knowledge or learning. Although there were some offerings in the curriculum over the 7 – 9 Years where students could undertake more student-centred learning and pursue an interest, this was very limited. Coming from an environment where she was encouraged to be a curious learner she was soon dismayed that the rigid structure of the mainstream curriculum did not offer opportunities to enhance more independent learning for young people. She did not feel deeply engaged in her learning and this disappointed her.
Bernie also found the idea of punishment/positive reinforcement a perplexing way of encouraging young people to learn. When asked to explain what that meant for her, she replied, “if I just conformed and completed tasks , even though I found them boring, I would be praised for that, but if I just didn’t want to do that task (because it was boring to me) I was given a detention or made to complete it in some way. It was like the teacher had to tick a box!
Bernie knew she was capable and knew there were good teachers over the years who tried to help her. Now she is completing her VM, much more suited to her way of learning, she can reflect on what would have helped her better navigate those middle years. She firmly believes all ‘kids’ should have a clear reason for coming to school, give students curriculum they can connect with and lastly, better equip teachers to help and guide individuals who feel they don’t belong or struggle to fit into the school environment.