t was late in 2004, just as Spring had begun to spread across the landscape, when I first met Kath Rivers. Nairn Walker had initiated a gathering of people at the Mount Arthur Centre which is situated a short distance from my home on Brown Mountain, a rainforest-topped hillside on the rim of the Lilydale valley in Northern Tasmania. We were there to participate in what she had described to me as an “educational dreaming conversation.”
I
At first, I was intrigued that Nairn thought that I should be there. I soon discovered that we were there to listen to Kath and to help her brainstorm, verbalise and formulate a plan for further change at her school. That afternoon, as fine droplets of mist hung in the cool mountain air, we shared lunch and visions of how education could be at Oceanview High School.
Some days later, I was excited, and somewhat surprised, when, in response to my mailed invitations, Kath telephoned me to say that she’d be glad to participate in my study. I remember giving a great whoop of joy as I hung up the telephone – I had attracted my first participant to the study, and I was thrilled to have her support and involvement. Even more pleasing for me was that at our first meeting I’d found Kath to be someone to admire. She’d shown herself to be a straight-talker, as well as someone who wanted the best for her students, and the fact that she was keen to explore exactly what that might mean made her an appealing contributor to the study.
I’m always a bit nervous coming to a new school. The signposting on the roads to Oceanview has confused me and I’m running a few minutes late, which is something
Kath Rivers that I hate. I eventually sort out in my mind which driveway belongs to the high school and find a space in the car park.
As I make my way to the office, I note the striking three-dimensional sculptured murals alluding to Neptune’s undersea world which adorn the exterior walls of the building. The older of the two women in the office comes to the reception desk. I try hard to curb my urge to break into a grin at the sight of her bright purple hair. The Gatekeeper asks if I have an appointment and, after my reply, she directs me to wait outside Kath’s office. Kath has been called away to Somewhere Else in the school, so I use this time to let my eyes wander around my surroundings.
Daylight from an overhead skylight reflects from coloured glass mobiles hanging from the ceiling above a raised indoor garden. Hand-painted wooden plaques, glossily polished fronts and rough bark backs, resemble tombstones around the garden’s edge, and the artist’s representational choice suggests to me an Aboriginal connection to the land on which the school is built, to the students, or to both. High on the wall behind the garden is a charter signed by the year’s senior cohort, committing themselves to “participate in the ‘No Dole Project’ which aims to place every 2004 Grade 10 student in further education, training or employment by 31st March 2005.”
As I finish jotting down field notes, Kath arrives and welcomes me. She tells me that she’d kill for a cup of coffee and asks if I’d like a drink. At my “I’d love one, thanks,” she whisks me away from the foyer and through the school. I feel rather like Alice in Wonderland chasing after the White Rabbit as we head through a series of passageways and out into one of the large, open plan classrooms. We almost manage to get past a group of laughing girls when one of them races up to Kath and grabs her by her arms, embracing her in a dance-hold and twirling her around the room: “You’ll dance with me, won’t you, Mrs R?” They spin wildly around, the girl’s long, dark hair flying out behind her. After a few twirls, and giddy from the dance, Kath light-heartedly laughs to the group: Somebody take this mad girl away!
I reflect back on my own time in school, not recognising anything from those distant times in this interaction between a principal and her students. I marvel at how much school principals have changed in the 30 years since I left school at the end of Grade 10. Then I speculate that perhaps this has more to do with the differences between the two principals themselves than the time that separates them.
Kath Rivers
“I’ve been at school since I was 6”
Kath has been at school forever. Forever. I got a scholarship, a studentship with the Education Department when I was 17. So I’ve never left school. I’ve been at school since I was 6.
Although she always wanted to be a teacher, Kath has no idea why. I’m the oldest child in my family. Mum went through to Year 10, I think. I think Dad left school in Grade 6. As young kids we were poor. My sister did a year of what would now be TAFE1 secretarial, joined the Air
Force and stayed there for 15 [years]. One of my brothers owns a service station, the other one’s a truckie, so I’m not from a middle class family.
I was always going to be a home economics teacher. If they hadn’t had studentships, I wouldn’t have been able to go [to teachers’ college], because there wasn’t enough money. My parents never owned their own home or anything like that. So, there’s no way I would’ve gone, and it wouldn’t have been because they didn’t want me to. They just wouldn’t have had the money.
Kath has taught a range of things, a bit of art, a bit of English, primary school. [When] this whole notion of middle schooling started, I became a middle school teacher, and never looked back really. I loved it! I was scared to death, ’cos, “I don’t know how to do this!” Kath believes that these growth experiences were critical incidents. She was presented with lots of other opportunities around leadership, and recognised that, you know, okay, I can do some of this stuff, and other people think I’m alright at it, and I’m really enjoying it. Taking up the numerous opportunities that came her way led Kath to develop confidence in her abilities. [I] had to learn to team teach, and learn how to be a grade leader, and then had to learn how to run a middle school in a large school of 1,100 students where the middle school was about, I think it was four classes in each grade, so it was big, like it was probably three hundred and sixty, seventy, something like that, kids.
At 48, Kath no longer describes herself as a teacher, but as an educator. I laugh at what appears to me to be a reversal of power when she tells me that her teachers let her go in front of the kids sometimes. She explains to me that, although she likes working with the kids, that they all know her, and that she knows them – most of their names and bits about them – teaching is more than that. There is recognition by her of the complexity of the teacher’s role, and her articulation of the alternative part that she feels is hers to play in the life of the school:
1 Technical and Further Education.
Kath Rivers
I don’t know the kids well enough as learners. I don’t work in a team with a group of other teachers for planning. I don’t have time to plan properly for my classes and I don’t have time to assess, so how could I call myself a teacher? I can teach them stuff at a superficial level and we can have a good time, but in terms of developing the really meaningful kind of learning sequences and stuff, nah! It’s not my job so why would I call myself a teacher? But my job is to work with teachers to make them better at their job.
However Kath also sees her role as being there for the students. They know where to come if they need me, and need help, so I think in terms of, she draws a deep breath, before starting again. The way that the kids see me, it’s as a support and I’m on their side, and I try and work with them, but they also know that that’s where the line is too. And I will do the hard thing if I need to.
And the kids do indeed appear to know where to come when they need support. Kath operates an open door policy for students. In fact, her room is set up specifically as an inviting space to talk, with five lounge chairs set around a coffee table, in addition to the chair at her desk in the corner of the room. At times during my visits to Kath she was sitting down with either a delegation of students or an individual student – the international exchange student hoping to find a new host family – or we had students interrupt us with their adolescent, but very real, anxieties – the teenage girls fretful about a friend with body image issues who has locked herself in one of the girls’ toilets. I observed Kath respectfully listening to their concerns, asking them for their contributions to resolutions, and assuring them that their confidences remain safe with her.
“Degrees of separation” from “the main game”
Oceanview High School is Kath’s second principalship. When I first spoke with her, she was in her third year at the school. My first year here I thought I’d walked into a bomb zone; it was just horrific. It was full of the most disengaged, disenfranchised, sour…
In my mind, I anticipate that Kath is going to say “students,” but she continues uninterrupted, surprising me.
… teachers that you’d ever meet in your life. And the kids were running the joint in an aggressive way. They didn’t care about it. It was graffiti and rubbish everywhere and nobody cared about the place. And I thought, “My God, what am I gonna do?” And they didn’t care about me either!
Kath Rivers
“Well,” I thought, “that’s hurtful!” So, anyway, I decided that I needed a critical friend and that’s how it started.
Kath describes to me how she spoke to a former colleague about her concerns. Her friend had been principal at Brooks High School where Nairn had run Birribi,2 and he suggested that Kath speak to Nairn. From this initial introduction, Kath found that Nairn became like a friend. She was somebody that Kath could talk to in order to help her to articulate the way that I was feeling about the problems that I was having at the school.
So, it grew out of that, and Nairn worked with us in a range of ways around trying to help the staff build up stronger relationships with the kids. So they all started to trust her, and value her advice. So I was pretty happy with that.
Then, about 6 weeks prior to my first interview with Kath, the germ of an idea started to fester – thoughts about what might be missing from her plans for Oceanview High. This prompted her to have another chat with Nairn. This conversation resulted in the gathering at the Mount Arthur Centre, where I’d first met Kath. Nairn had thought that the group of people she’d invited to attend might be able to help Kath focus and hone her ideas for change.
We started talking about what I wanted to do, and I had all these concerns because of all this [state education departmental structure] reorganisation and my concern about it is that, I mean education’s got some really, really clear, “big picture” things that you need to get right for it to work, you know, around curriculum, and your relationships and stuff like that, but all of this stuff’s being measured, and if you can’t measure it you can’t do it kind of thing. And I said to Nairn, “But I know, I know that what the teachers need is to be able to relate better to the kids, because then when you make mistakes around your pedagogy, or whatever, it doesn’t matter because the relationships are strong.”
This time, I do interject. “And they’ll forgive you.”
Exactly, ’cos they care. And it’s become more critical because of the structures that we’ve got in the school because the teachers are now required to work in teams and, warts and all, things are a million percent better than they were, but they need more, different skills to be effective team members than they needed when they were the, she pauses for a moment, artisan in their own little classroom. It’s just a different environment.
I tell Kath that during our meeting at the Mount Arthur Centre I had sensed that she
Kath Rivers was disillusioned in some way. She agrees with my perception.
I’m disillusioned with the system. Totally disillusioned with the system, because of this notion that it’s about accountability and [that], somehow, if you restructure all of this stuff and make it accountable it’s gonna [improve student learning outcomes]. It’s not at all, and so I feel like it’s degrees of separation, and I’m separating more, because as I’m getting older, I’m thinking that the amount of value that people give to the skills around building strong teaching and learning relationships is diminishing, and the amount of value that’s being given to the structures and the curriculum and passing this test and being allowed to do this, this and this is growing, and that, to me, should be the other way around, and then you’d know you had a good system.
“There’s a conflict there?”
There’s a real conflict for me at the moment, yeah. And so, I guess, the project [of school improvement] that I’ve got happening is an attempt to kind of make that right for my own set of values, I think, that I know to be true as a teacher. [Improvements to their education] that I know these kids, in a public system, should have, for all sorts of really good reasons.
“So you think that the friendships, and the relationships, and the growth of self are important?” I build on the point made by Kath earlier.
If your purpose, as an educator, is to help kids to be the best that they can be, then all that stuff around relationships and helping them to know themselves, and valuing their differences, and all that kind of gear has to be the main game, and it simply isn’t [within the current system], so that’s the frustration, yeah. And in terms of my growth as an individual, probably even 5 years ago I wouldn’t have been able to name that up as clearly, so at least the turmoil that I’ve been struggling with because of all this [departmental restructuring and curriculum] change that’s been going on now has at least enabled me to be really clear about that. REALLY clear about it, yeah.
“MESH will maybe open up some thinking perhaps”
In their preliminary discussions about how some of Kath’s broader ideas for change might be realised at Oceanview, Nairn had suggested to Kath that the MESH program might offer a valuable contribution both to Kath and her school staff. Kath was open to ideas that might improve her school, and willing to explore the idea of running a whole-staff MESH PD workshop at the school, as one of a range of
Kath Rivers strategies3 that she was keen to implement to achieve her goals.
Kath was aware that a couple of members of her staff had undertaken MESH training in the past, and that they were already working with students at Oceanview using the skills that they had developed during the 3-day workshop. Another staff member, Kym Oliver,4 had already registered to attend an upcoming MESH training. Following our discussions at the Mount Arthur Centre, Kath had decided that: I’m just going to tag along [to the MESH training workshop] with Kym, which will be great. Tagging along with Kym would allow Kath to assess whether the MESH program, delivered as a whole-staff PD, would fit with her ideas for change.
In her initial thinking, there were two elements Kath was hoping the PD might address. One’s the personal element which is the impact that some of the [management] issues have on me, and better ways to deal with them, and so I’m really kind of thinking that if I get something like that for myself that’d be a bonus. The other thing is that I spend so much time dealing with things that crop up because of stuff that I think doesn’t belong in the professional arena, however it impacts, and it happens time and time again, and the same people are the ones that keep causing the most grief for others. They’ve got a whole range of strategies for avoiding their own responsibilities or for [avoiding] having a good hard look at themselves. It’s a deficit way of looking at things and they try and divert attention away from themselves and blame outside influences and it all blocks them from being able to have those relationships with the kids.
A teacher at Oceanview comes to her mind, and Kath uses him as an example to illustrate her meaning. There’s one guy who’s deaf. He must be close to 60. He feels he’s got to