[00:00:00] : Kia ora everyone and welcome to the augmented learning podcast and video log before we get started and before I explain why we have a podcast coming out on Friday. I just wanna just ask you that if you listen to the podcast and you get some value from it uh and you enjoy listening to other educators or leaders or influences speak and talk around some of the concepts and, and themes that we talk about them. Please jump on and give the podcast a rating that really helps with downloads and helps us bring on more exciting and good educational guest to the podcast but onto today's podcast, this is something new. We're calling it Friday follow up and basically what Friday follow up is, that's probably a really naff name, but I don't have anything else right now. So if you do have a suggestion for a better name hit me with it because I think Friday follow, it needs to go. But that's why I'm going with at the moment and Friday follow up, we are just unpacking the podcast episode that's been released that week, having a look at some of the take away some of the things that we can pull out from that and learn from that. It's not going to be long, five minutes tops, I'm hoping and we'll end with a bit of a provocation for you as an educator, something that you can take away something that you can action or reflect on as we move into the weekend and then the following week. So in this week's episode we had Emma Don Emma Donohue is head of health, physical education and outdoor ed at Oxford area School down in Oxford set Canterbury, I'm not sure. And she was talking about what it's like to teach in a rural environment and she talked about a lot of things. She also touched on her role as a within school lead in their Kayoko. Um and she talked about some of the work that she did on the panel around um at Penn's conference earlier in the year. But the thing, the key takeaway for me was really her talk around what it's like to teach in a rural school and some of those things, she talked about what she talked about the challenges of teaching in a rural environment and some of those included the student and the responsibilities that they carried outside of the classroom in the long hours that they're pulling in a rural environment with a lot of them farming, they had things like having a cut hay, they had responsibilities around weather and what that meant for them on a farm. They had the impact of snow and flooding. Um and I also talked about things like staff often being located outside of the community, so there's a little bit more disconnect from that community and also the need to travel or commute to get to their to get to the school and so there were some of the challenges and I think some of those are really big, That student responsibility one really got to me. They had me thinking about that are a little more debt are some of the positives that Emma discussed though was how in that smaller community you have access to local experts and the ability to connect with them. She talked about being able to create really rich learning context that are authentic and are meaningful because they are occurring in that local community and environment. And then Emma talked about because of the size of the community. There's this strong and deep relationships formed between school home and also businesses within the community which I think is really, really positive. And so that led me to this thought that the load that rural students carry is quite visible. We we can see that as a rural student with a lot of these students particularly down here working on a farm. The load that they carry is quite visible. And so I was thinking about my students and my students, the loads that they carrying, the baggage that they have is not as visible. However they still carry just as much. And it reminded me of time spent visiting Melbourne in college in Australia. Uh a sports academy in Australia that I've visited with with Celia and also with a number of other physical educators a few years ago and what was unique about the school as it was really just focused on sport and sport performance and was about training elite athletes. But they had these contracts and they had student contracts which were your, your, your, your generic student contract. I'm going to do this. I need to make sure I'm doing this and I um, I commit to doing this this and this, so stock standard student contract, but they also had a teacher contract. Now. This teacher contract was about a teachers acknowledging that the students that they had in front of their class were unique, that they were training to become professional athletes. That they had X number of hours of training during the week. They had X number of hours committed to performing on the sports field, whether that's as a golfer or netball or basketball. And so part of the contract was about agreeing to have flexible deadlines, agreeing to have all of their work available online and all these other different things that really acknowledged and um, yeah, I guess acknowledged the additional work that these students were carrying outside of the classroom, and I thought that was really cool and I thought that was really unique. So, my provocation for yours, do you really know how much your students carry from day to day? You know, thinking back and reflecting on what we identified about rural students and then also that story I just shared about marijuana in college and if you're uncertain about this, what can you do to connect and understand your learners better? So, thanks for checking out the episode on Wednesday. Thanks for having to listen to me yarn on about my thoughts on students and the loads that they carry within our classrooms and within our schools. Um, I hope that provocation gets you thinking and get you unpacking it a little bit more for you and your learners in the place that you teach. Like I said, if you're getting value from this, please jump on. Give the podcaster review, preferably five stars on Itunes. Uh, and I'll see you on the next episode. Thanks.
