Barbara Burrington is passionate about documentation. It may not sound exciting, but as you learn more about Barbara's anthropological approach to the study of teaching, you begin to see what it looks like when teachers are engaged in reflective practice. As you learn about her students' constant recording of their interactions--and the interactions of their peers--with the young children at UVM's pre-school laboratory, you begin to see how documentation can be exciting. When you see a video that one of her students has created, and discover how the video helped the student better understand how children learn, you begin to catch some of the passion.
Even the way that Barbara tells her own story is somewhat anthropological. She tells of how she came to the teaching profession, following a long line of family members that were in one "helping" profession or another. Her mother had been a Home Economics teacher, and her mother before that a nurse. When it came time for Barbara to decide what she wanted to do, "I needed only ask myself which of these kinds of helping or caring professionals do I want to be?"
She continues her story, relating how she eventually ended up at UVM. As Barbara tells her story, it becomes clear that she is an observer--watching the dynamics of her surroundings and trying to create something from what she learns through observation. The story includes a stint at a school where "The people were very diverse and interesting in a concentrated way." The school was engaged in an innovative collaboration with York University, and all members of the community approached this collaboration with a great deal of intensity. Unfortunately, the same level of intensity was given to a dispute that erupted at the school. Barbara stayed on through the dispute, trying for a couple of years to "be part of the evolution," helping the school get through the problems and emerge a better place. The effort exhausted her, though, and eventually Lynn sought out new horizons, and found them at UVM.
Her work at UVM heading up the pre-school program has helped Barbara take her passion for observing and turn it into a "meaning-making" tool for students. "I've become a lot more articulate about my practice, and clear that our job as teacher educators is to help teachers become more articulate, and to help them express their understanding through multiple "languages." Barbara helps students learn these "languages" by providing them with different ways to observe children's development, new ways of seeing their own teaching, and tools for presenting what they've learned.
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Through Barbara's mentorship, students become just as passionate about documentation as she is. "We use an anthropological model. Our students keep field books, and in the year they spend at the lab school, they observe, gather data, sort data, analyze it, etc." Barbara explains that students use lots of different ways to do this photography, writing, video, and other forms of expression. She explains how the documentation makes the learning much more rich and complex than if students were simply going into the field, doing the teaching, and reflecting. The work of documenting interactions and what goes on in the pre-school classroom actually heightens students' understanding of teaching and learning in a way that simple reflection can't.
As you might imagine, with Barbara and her students doing all this documenting over the years, the pre-school program has developed quite a collection. Central in that collection are many hours of video that students have taken, and since Barbara began using digital video with her student teachers, those hours have grown at a more rapid rate. Even with the importance she places on the use of technology for documentation, Barbara emphasizes that the documentation isn't about the technology alone: "Technology is so prevalent in our culture. It wouldn't work for me to be in a school and not bring these in. Video and still images allow us to reflect on what's happening. But the technology itself wouldn't be enough. Unless you're professional level, you can't capture everything that's happening. Student teachers still need to develop those languages--ways to express what they're observing and tell the whole story."
Spoken like a true anthropologist, and someone who's passionate not only about technology and documentation, but also about teaching.
