Lizanne Foster

Blogger, Change agent, Educator/Teacher, Global soul, Idea generator

I haven’t always been a teacher of Humanities at a secondary school in Canada. Before this, I was a weight-loss counsellor for being paid $6.50 an hour plus commission to tell clients to eat their vegetables, drink lots of water and to walk at least 40 minutes a day. Before that, I cleaned houses, scrubbing and vacuuming and dusting and putting things away while my employers made much more money in jobs that were really worth their time. Before that, I was a guidance counsellor in a junior secondary school in South Africa, feeling fraudulent about telling kids that if they just worked hard enough they could overcome the barriers in the paths of people of their skin colour. Before that, I was in between my life that was and my life to be and was just hanging around with a friend one day when a local principal telephoned and asked if she would teach at his school as he was desperate for teachers and she said that she was not interested but that her friend might be and she passed the phone to me.

Shifting the dominant paradigms in schools.

To prepare our children for the complete restructuring of our political, economic and social systems necessitated by the climate change crisis, teach them a New Literacy: an integration of traditional literacy with ecological, emotional, technological-media, critical and social literacies within a framework of ubuntu, the African concept that “ I am because we are”. Such a shift in the way we educate would mean that the teaching of content /subjects would be replaced by the teaching of multi-literacies so that a student so educated would be able to see/read the world in a way that integrates the kinds of literacies that existed pre-scientific revolution ( e.g. how to “read” the water/sky/land) with the math & science literacies that have shown us, since the scientific revolution, how to see/read the world beyond the visible light spectrum. Competition would be replaced by collaboration,connection & creativity as the dominant paradigms in schools where the New Literacy is taught.

Education