An Interview with Chris Hickey
(“Int” refers to the interviewer, “Chris” refers to Chris Hickey)
Int:	Chris, I feel its worthwhile starting by trying to paint on the broadest canvas possible, and I'm really interested in your overall views on what effective teaching and learning means to you and maybe in relation to your initial major area of teaching activity in physical education.
Chris:	It's a difficult one to answer Dale, I think that good teaching is represented by what you're actually trying to achieve and there's a lot of prescriptive views on what it means to be a good teacher but I kind of take a view that you can only be a good teacher if you achieve what you set out to do—so a third session of a hockey unit is very different from, say, the first session of a badminton unit or something like that, or an approach that you're trying to get the kids involved is very different from an athletics approach where you might be more directly instructional, so you can't sort of make an assessment about it unless you get what you want to get. And one of the examples I use on the CD is a teacher teaching a hurdle session, and what she does is quite unusual in that she sets up three sets of hurdles, and they're at different heights and slightly different distances and she gets the kids to jump over the hurdles. The traditional approach to teaching hurdles is very prescriptive in that the kids learn the snap, crackle, pop, how to drive with their knee first and how to count the steps in between hurdles and it becomes very teacher-centric. What she does is just gets them out there, they're jumping hurdles madly, and she gets them in and she talks to them about the different experiences at different heights, at different distances, then she gets them into pairs and they have to talk about with their partner what leg they took off on, and things like that and she builds up this knowledge base from the kids really who are non-experts in fact. A lot of the girls just jump the little hurdles because they find hurdles very intimidating. And at the very end of the session, she says to the group, I think it's a grade 5/6 group, she said 'which hurdles did you like?', 'which ones did you find best?' and most of them agree they like the middle ones and many of the girls like the little ones and she said 'well, did you know that for your age group, the big ones are the official height' and there's this sort of gasp amongst the group thinking—if she'd come out, I think, and just set up the right age-group hurdles and those sorts of things, it would have been a completely different set of experiences. So, in that regard, it's an example, I think, of teaching in context of what you're trying to get and engaging kids in the learning and all those sorts of things.
Int:	In terms of values, Chris, and if you're involved in teacher education and so on, how much do you need to actually value children, and to like children and be interested in them as people and their development, to be a good teacher, a good educator of children?
Chris:	Well, I personally believe that you have to value children a lot and to me it's the very thing that I was talking about before. It's a set of soft skills that often make the teacher a good teacher. It's a capacity to engage them, to grab their interest, to be caring with them, to sort of promote tolerance, justice and those sorts of things which, when we look at good teaching, it's often 'technocised' to how we gave instructions, how we define boundaries, did I develop the subject matter in the right sequence—it's a whole set of technical skills that really, I think, very much undermine or undersell what it means to be a good teacher.
Int:	You have immersed yourself in teaching practice and have observed good teachers at work and clearly have been able to reflect upon good teaching. To what extent does your research and scholarly interest in teacher education, take physical education as an example, sort of shape your approach to teaching well in that field?
Chris:	Oh, a lot. I think it's just intensely connected to me. I can't ever separate the two out. I started, initially, I think my foray into intellectualising it at any level, was around critical theory which was strong on things like justice, equity, tolerance and making sure that, particularly in a field like physical education where the most able kids can very easily have very good experiences and less able kids can be marginalised, trivialised, and I think that perspective helped me understand what I want to… and gave me a licence to actually start to rethink this subject matter and in more recent times I've been probably more post-structural in my thinking in that there's multiple experiences and no one activity is interpreted the same way by everybody sort of thing and it's getting teachers to look at the multiplicity of experiences and not just either the middle ground or get the weakest kid and try and assess what their experience was, and from there ascertain everybody else's but make efforts to actually engage with what the respective experiences of that learning is.
Int:	That probably draws us towards an interest in digital media and online technology. I mean, you've given a lot of thought to how to teach the subject matter and what the subject matter should be. How did you become interested in the whole area of the digital world and its relevance and its possibilities for a different type of approach to physical education pedagogy?
Chris:	I think that the answer to that is it probably became more interested in me than I did of it. I mean, in the uni system, there's been a strong push over the last decade and since to be more online. It's tied up in words like innovation and all those sorts of things to do things in media forms. In practical terms, what underpinned this innovation or development was that we were now teaching teachers off campus. We would teach teachers for the first time that we wouldn't meet and therefore trying to get a message like the one I'm talking about in terms of thinking about being reflective about your practice, engaging with what are the consequences of the sorts of things you do and the hidden curriculum and things like that, I guess what we tried to do was design a resource that would project a range of views, a range of perspectives, a range of reflections, etc. and therefore the digital medium became appropriate to us. We didn't just do it because – well, let's do something digitally. We actually put the mission of what we were trying to achieve in front of the medium and then we kept in mind what we were trying to achieve – trying to develop particular perspectives around teaching and therefore we wanted to try and develop it into some digital medium that we could reach out and get to people that we weren't going to see.
Int:	In terms of, and we're talking about the CD Rom Critically Reflecting Teaching and Physical Education and you've got a framework for it, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty of how do I design, how do I select and develop material. When you open up the CD Rom, you get a menu and it appears to be around critical perspectives and you can get drop-down menus and you see strands of critical perspectives. How did you come up with that very open design?
Chris:	I think initially, what we tried to do was break the tradition of a book, in that you start somewhere, you end somewhere—that there's a start and an end to this process and straight away we went for circles. We went for… the whole metaphor was circular, so there's circles on the front, the design, the drop out bubbles, and things when you go into different zones were circles, and we tried to make it just continuous in a sense that it is a resource and you will go to where you want to go according to what you're trying to find out. So, in terms of design, then it was a case of trying to depict issues and themes around different categories and where we've really done the breakdown is around curriculum and pedagogy or teaching/learning which are kind of hard things to break up anyway because they're intimately entwined in the educational or in the pedagogic process. But, within those, we've done separations and we've tried to provide a range of content and a range of perspectives and a range of examples around the development of each of those in our area.
Int:	Have you found, in terms of your academic colleagues within Deakin and outside, any challenge with the way you've designed that interface and that way of engaging with those critical perspectives. I mean, is it contested the way you've done it, or do you feel as though you've come up with something which is a happy medium – pardon the pun – but accommodating of different views on how you could do it?
Chris:	Overwhelmingly, I would say I've had very good feedback about it and particularly in education circles, partly because, and this is… the only criticism that I've had, is it lacks a technical edge to it in terms of what am I supposed to do? What do I do next? I got this thing, I opened it, what do you want me to open first? What do you want me do? And I think that people who are looking for more structured forms of learning, can grapple with it – just find, it's really literally a resource. But people in education in particular have found it very refreshing for that reason and in fact it's reasonably unique in that regard too, that it's not structured in many ways at all, it is literally a resource and how I structure it is pretty much in unit guides and what I'm trying to achieve so I actually use the resource with any number of my undergraduate courses now. In fact, I've sent it out to post-grads now, I mean, just as a resource, the same as I would post out a book. I find it can be a useful resource and I will direct them to it according to what I want to them to look at, what I want them to explore.
Int:	I guess I've been very much into the Deakin Advantage, the statement of graduate attributes, and when I came to work through the CD Rom, I could see how it was trying to provide an international set of perspectives. Then when I got deeper, I saw it having something to do with sort of ethics and social responsibility and the impacts of globalisation and it really became very intriguing regards the types of attributes that it was addressing. Would you like to comment on the CD Rom in regard to some of those attributes?
Chris:	Yeah, I think that the attributes it's trying to develop are the sort of soft-skills that I was talking about before – are the capacity, the willingness to reflect on something, the willingness, the capacity to make decisions about things, to focus on how other people experience things and things like that. And in terms of trying to give it an international edge, obviously there's a limited amount of that I guess on it. Specifically, there's certainly a range of interviews where I've got international experts in there and I'm reminded of one conversation, I think it's around curriculum, I can't remember off the top of my head, and it's got Juan Miguel Fernandez Balboa from Spain, it's got David Kirk from Scotland, it's got Dawn Penny from England and someone else from Canada, and you just get this range of accents, just listening to this conversation, you kind of know who's talking according to their accent, so at that level, there's attempts to do that and they all reflect on their respective situations and their national perspectives, if you like, and they aggregated around what's happening in Australia in the Australian context. But aside from that, what I think has struck me more and more over more recent times is that a lot of what I presented on the CD is germane to so many different aspects. I've got a woman over at the moment who's doing a PhD with me from China and she's looking at so many of the same issues in the context of China and she finds it really interesting and has found it really valuable to explore as a sort of a baseline for getting familiar with some of the things, and she keeps saying, oh yes, that's very similar to how we experience it. So, at that level, I think its got a really generic, sort of, set of issues and responses that are presented on it.
Int:	I think the CD, Chris, is used at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in physical education and presumably you can't be everywhere at once and you've got to rely on other teachers using the resource or the CD constructively, how is it used by the teachers—how do you work with the teachers? How is it used, and how do you think students have responded to it?
Chris:	The responses I've got have been really good, but it's typical… the case is that I typically get responses from people who use it well and use it a lot, and they will come back to me and say 'oh, I found it really useful, you know, I loved it as a resource' and I know that there's another group of people that I get a trickle of responses to it, who find it frustrating for a number of reasons. One of those is that it's a dynamic set up involved in it, it's a website that's entirely, sort of, dynamic and interactive and at the same time it's got these hard files and people who have any technical issues, typically find coming off the web and things like that, are problems, so we have a lot of students who still grapple with technology at that level. But, overwhelmingly, I get really good responses to it you know, that it's a really useful resource that, you know, I find in my assignments, which… I'm reading student assignments, in particular of postgrad teachers being up-skilled, in-service teachers if you like. I find them referring to many, many incidents on it as sort of baseline to discuss. I remember such and such in the hurdle session, it was interesting and they'll use the narratives as a way of communicating their message or their interpretation.
Int:	Do you find any of the teachers or students a little bit resistant to the critically challenging view? I mean, it is very challenging of the traditional nature of the physical education curriculum and you know what and how it should be taught and so on. I mean, do you get evidence of, you know, it transformed my way of thinking about this field, or people going 'I didn't agree with you Chris, I really resist your view, your critical perspective, I don't believe in it'. Does it have that sort of impact, positive and negative?
Chris:	Yeah it does at a level. I think you've hit on it to some extent. I certainly get a critical mass who do find it transforming and it does bring issues that they haven't thought about to the fore. And it does alter the way they think about their practice, so that's on the healthy side of the ledger. On the less healthy side of the ledger, I do get people who come to me ultimately and say 'yeah, well what do you want us to do? At the end of the day, what are you actually promoting? How should I do this?' and in a way… and that's the one thing I haven't done, is ended up with a recipe at the end to say, here's how, so as a result of all this, here's what you should do. I go back to my earlier comment that I think that its so contextual and contingent as to what you want to do, that no expert, or no-one can claim to be an expert as this is how you do it. And for some student teachers, undergrads in particular, that can be very frustrating because they've come in to find answers and to walk out with more questions than they actually came in with, can be a very frustrating thing and at one level they can feel very disempowered from the experience that they're actually further back in a sense than they were when they started. They thought they'd come to this unit, they'd learn how to teach physical education properly, and they'd move on, or they'd have their view of how to teach physical education confirmed and they'd career on. For many of them, they'd have their existing view unsettled, and that can be, I think, very confronting for them.
Int:	Chris, do you find students who might engage with it, do their practicum, even graduate or come back after graduation and say, well, I was unsettled, or I didn't quite get the message in it, but I think I've got it more now with some work experience?
Chris:	Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think that getting out and amongst it – once they get out and they experience the existence in the real world of teaching, if you like, what I find is that a lot of them come back to it after a couple of years, so they will have taken it on board, it will have sown a seed, and the first year of being a full-time teacher or out there doing emergency teaching or whatever they're doing, is very busy and they're just, sort of, finding their feet and they become overwhelmed with managerial stuff that they've just got to learn to manage and exist. And the CD talks about that too, you know, in a lot of ways we try and get the basics in place, but it's not an end point, its only really a means to achieve something else and I think when they can get to that stage where they get a comfortability with that management and they then can go up to the next plain and say, 'OK, what am I trying to get out of this and who's getting what out of it?' – yeah, I think that they're the sort of students I find coming back to me to do Masters units and even more recently, I've had a couple of people come back to do PhD's with me and largely, I think, because of this message, you know, because they have embraced the message of – I want to look inside this more, I want to understand it, I want to share it.
Int:	I don't know whether we can dream of the ideal world in academia Chris, but beyond what you've done, what do you think the possibilities might be in terms of future digital media development and usage? I mean, do you have a sense of - if I could, if only we could, I could actually further dramatically enhance the teaching in this field or other education fields using digital media?
Chris:	Gee, that's an interesting question Dale. At a really specific level, I think that one of the things that would be good with the critical reflective teaching in physical education is to make it simpler again and that is to have the whole thing sit on a CD Rom, I think, and cut out the interactiveness or the dynamic component of it so it just loaded into a CD. At a short level, I think that there's a whole range of layers to your question, you know, my mind immediately thinks of the things we currently do that all could be improved a bit, you know, and I think of my work in the Doctor of Education program. We have a very robust, online, digital environment where people come in and out and I communicate with people all around the world on a regular basis and I think the trick is to find ways of developing relationships and to be able to then talk about things that aren't just technical processes, you know, you do this first, and I find that a lot of the digital stuff is really just another way of packaging up what we did in the past, and now you can get my unit outline on the web and there's a discussion list there and what I find in discussion lists often is we don't break any of the old traditional patterns, we get a student talks, the teacher responds, another student says something, teacher responds, and we get this sort of discursive pattern of authority, student, authority, student and I think that one of the challenges in those sorts of environments is to break some of those things. I think they're hard things to break in the physical, let alone in the digital sense, so I think they're the challenges, and in terms of how the mediums do that, I think the technology is there to do it already, I think the pedagogies aren't very well advanced and the pedagogies need to catch up with the technologies. Personally, I think that's where the next phase is.
Int:	You've done some great work Chris, and I think you work with other colleagues who have done great work as well. What do you think is really required to get more academic teaching staff in Universities switched onto the possibilities to do good work with digital media and online technology?
Chris:	I think that… there's a few things. I think time is a big inhibiter and that a lot of teachers, a lot of academic staff are busy trying to run research agendas, they've got administration, they've got on-campus students. At the moment, there's an expectation, say, within the Faculty of Education, that every unit has a digital presence. Well, for a lot of staff, that's just a bug-bear, you know, they go down and they teach the unit, they've got students knocking on their door anyway, or that they've just walked out to teach, and then they've got to teach it again in a sense and have it online and, you know, the proliferation and the intensification of work is part of the problem here, sort of thing. So, one thing I think is that there needs to be a sense of how this gets factored in. Email's a classic. Email is just on all day, you know. You just get 27, 30 emails a day that require substantive content, or substantive responses. So, time is a big factor and I think that the other one is that there's still a sense of – it's still second class – its still the poor cousin of being up close, and being able to work with them and until people embrace the message that this is a… at least a parallel set of experiences can be developed here, and they've got the time to do that, then I think its always going to lumber along with a lot of people. So, in the end, I think it's going to take some sort of generational change, and you can see it happening now as newer staff come in , it just becomes part of the culture of what they do and I think that with the next group of staff, as they move in, the digital concepts will just be a part of how they work and I think they'll be much more open to using it in creative ways, to making it work, whereas I think for a lot of people, they've bolted on or rusted onto an existing sort of paradigm that they felt quite comfortable with and existed with for a long time. So, there's a generational shift and simultaneously, I think, it will be a paradigm shift in what it represents and how it projects out.
	close this window