198 Getting Beyond Monotony: Vignettes from a Beginning Teacher Joseph Tong Ill be honest.

I am not the traditional shell for a home economics teacher. I wear plaid shirts, skinny jeans, and size 11 leather boots. I do, however, live and breathe home economics and everything that comes with teaching about everyday life. The more I progress in this profession the more I question what I perceive to be a gap between what takes place in the classroom and what is realistic and relatable to our diverse students. Naturally I was excited to be presenting at this conference under the category of "The Changing Classroom. I believe that the changing home economics classroom is less to do with what content is covered in a course and more to do with who teaches that course and what that individual sees as their curriculum orientation. I am hoping that the way of thinking I suggest will relieve some of the stigma behind labels such as the non home economics trained teacher and open up conversations amongst curricular areas to collectively discover authentic learning experiences. What I offer is a wave of home economics education that takes students and teachers passions, expertise, and connections to a level beyond any textbook and worksheet. My goal in this short vignette is to present a perspective of a home economics classroom that I have been toying with, shaping, and changing for the past few years. Instead of theorizing and presenting a technical and jargon-filled method of pedagogy, I am going to write about general ideas and ways of thinking about curriculum and offer some insight into building connections inside and beyond the classroom. After I graduated from Home Economics Education and secured a position, I was offered copious amounts of resources, worksheets, videos, and textbooks. (It was after I read this last sentence at this years Teachers of Home Economics Specialist Association [THESA] conference that participants in the room started to applaud). Yes, the home economics teacher community is phenomenal with sharing resources, and I am humbled to be a part of it. Like many new teachers, I was told that it was in my best interest to use material that had been working for the last few decades. It only seemed logical - why reinvent the wheel? Keeping with traditional and classroomtested recipes, worksheets, and activities was supposed to guarantee student compliance, engagement, and skillbuilding. As much as I appreciated the support from the community of teachers I started thinking, as I was sifting through resources, about a question asked at a recent professional development day by a visiting teacher from North Carolina, Bill Ferriter. He asked the teachers in our school district, "Are today's students sitting in yesterday's classrooms?" (Ferriter, n.d.) Similarly, John Dewey (1944) stated that if we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow." I related to some of the frustration and disengagement of students. As a high school student in the 21st century, I had questioned the high amount of recitation that was found in my high school experience and it seemed as if my students were going through the same experience. I started a running list of questions to guide my process:
Proceedings of the Canadian Symposium XII: Issues and Directions in Home Economics / Family Studies / Human Ecology Education, Richmond, BC, February 22-24, 2013.

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Why do I do what I do? What do I truly want students to connect to and how can I be a part of it with them? What kind of work matters? How do I move beyond what I believe should be taught in certain subjects or grades levels, and move to a classroom environment where students are engaging with themselves and with others rather than engaging with the material that I have chosen?

The flood of questions led me to look into a curriculum orientation, which is often formulated by considering the reason why we do what we do, finding connections with our past experiences, and ultimately reevaluating course content. With this idea or orientation, we would continue to ask "what is the overarching goal that we expect students to achieve?" Many would suggest that students should be able to critically analyze issues related to content, be it a global water crisis or the implementation of school gardens. However, I wanted students to go deeper into the experience of participating in a home economics class. This year I decided to offer, as the issue or crisis, the curriculum. I asked students to consider how they had previously been taught and what they had previously recited, and seek a theme in which we could ground our coursework. I wanted our focus to extend beyond the technical skills (as is the structure of many home economics classrooms - grouping curriculum and course content into skill sets). Rather, what I wanted was to focus on something that was not as visible. In other words, I wanted to put hidden curriculum into consciousness. It took a few hours of deliberation before our classes settled on a theme. Our theme was plain and simple working with others. On the outside the theme seemed pretty easy to work with because any lab in home economics appears to exemplify an act of group work. My students and I didn't believe learning was as simple as putting people into groups and expecting magic to happen. We started to orient our focus to thinking about success, service, organization, safety, food preparation skills, society, and culture in relation to interpersonal dynamics. We discussed at lengths about the types of communication that happen within new groups, groups with friends, groups with mixed levels, and groups with mixed ages. We talked about the accountability of every member in a group when it came to food safety, organization, and overall success of a lab and the repercussions of actions. Through these conversations I found that we started to shift from focusing on classroom structure, rules, and theory to forming a classroom environment that prioritized experiences with interpersonal dynamics. Like many digital learners, my curriculum orientation and the inspiration for many of my classroom activities come from the Internet. By far the most valuable exchange of ideas has been with teachers of all disciplines whom I have connected with around the world through Twitter. The variety of educators online has inspired me to shift my priorities in my curriculum from skill-sets to concepts that are shared and discussed regularly on Twitter such as teaching the whole child (http://stevereifman.com), reversing Bloom's taxonomy (http://shelleywright.wordpress.com), flipping the classroom (http://twitter.com/#flipclass),and genius hour and
Proceedings of the Canadian Symposium XII: Issues and Directions in Home Economics / Family Studies / Human Ecology Education, Richmond, BC, February 22-24, 2013.

200 passion-based learning (http://twitter.com/#geniushour). During the conference we took a look at the hashtag (http://topsy.com/s/CSXII) that some of us had created and were tagging throughout the session. With all the tweets that we had posted during the three-day conference, we had managed to interact with organizations and educators in Canada, Hawaii, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In essence, the global exchange of ideas increases the breadth and depth of pedagogical movements and enhances the nature and immediacy of professional development. If we consider changes in the home economics classroom, what needs to change? Classroom environment? Classroom structure? Prescribed learning outcomes? I would suggest none of these, initially. I believe that any change has to come from within the mind of an educator that wants to change and try new things by not simply reevaluating what has been done before and how to make an existing lesson "better," but challenging and scrutinizing one's whole practice. I offer classroom teachers to take some time to reorient themselves in, out, and around their curriculum and continue to ask questions such as some of the questions I have offered in this piece. We may often spend time trying to set ourselves apart from everyone else (especially if we want to see our home economics programs survive) that we forget what matters to us and our students. I believe that innovation in home economics is not about a separation of our subject area from others but about natural connections. At the end of the day, we are everyday life, and life changes. I believe that only when we feel comfortable in an inevitable constant state of flux, can we start answering questions such as "is what we are doing in our classrooms purposeful?" From there we share, we connect, we engage, and we can innovate. A colleague asked me as I was writing this vignette: What makes you think that what you do is really going against the norm? The fact is, my motivation in curriculum design is not to go against the norm and I find it counterproductive to conceptualize curriculum in this way. I believe that in order to orient our thinking of the home economics classroom to a relatable and current space, we may be better off accepting but not replicating what we conceptualize as the normative classroom. Innovation is relative to every educator, and I would like to teach where change is normative but not a recitation of the norm. References: Dewey, John. (1944). Democracy and Education, New York: Macmillan Company. p. 167. Ferriter, W. (n.d.). http:/williamferriter.com

Proceedings of the Canadian Symposium XII: Issues and Directions in Home Economics / Family Studies / Human Ecology Education, Richmond, BC, February 22-24, 2013.