Walkabout Papers: Challenging Students to Challenge Themselves

By Maurice Gibbons

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0919173683
• ISBN13: 9780919173682
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: EduServ, Inc.
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

for any teacher interested in key issues in education

Review of The Walkabout Papers, Challenging Students to challenge themselves by Maurice Gibbons This book was obtained after a great deal of searching and asking many friends. But the pursuit paid off and finally almost 6 months after launching the search I found myself in the company of this book, thanks to a friend's effort in bringing it all the way from the US. This book is ` a selection of articles about ideas and practices whose time has come'. The words challenge and self-directed-learning point to the themes outlined in these articles. Challenge is not age specific and is experienced by every individual. Self directed learning, in the context of education, brings in a refreshing dimension. When does one become ready for self directed learning? Is it at all feasible for young students in school? Every young person goes through the phase when he or she is neither a child nor an adult and this is a painful and difficult period. Every teacher and parent would have noticed the obstacles that a young person encounters in this time of growing. It is also abundantly clear to any sensitive person that modern societies have not found a way of facilitating this period of change. The graduation rituals of schools and colleges do not adequately address the needs of the youth for a meaningful and dignified transition into adulthood. It is perhaps only tribal societies which seem to have found away of attending to this threshold. What is the connection between schooling and the growth into adulthood? Should schools at all be concerned with this interface? Or is this change only to be addressed when one graduates from college? The young need to make big choices after school. They need to prepare themselves for college and for the life of responsible adulthood. Since, as teachers, we are concerned with the growth of young people, it appears that the last one or two years in school could be a vital time to address all these issues. The Walkabout Papers show a landscape behind us historically, the landscape of tribal societies. At the same time it points to a direction ahead, truly assimilating the wisdom in Man's history. "Walkabout is adapted from a traditional practice of aboriginal Australian tribes in which adolescents are sent alone into the desert like outback for several months to prove their readiness for adulthood. Walkabout , like the educational practices of most primal peoples, is intensely experiential and challenging; and it is holistic, drawing on the personal and spiritual resources of the individual as well as his knowledge and skill. It is a task that both teaches and tests the individual in a way that is entirely appropriate for life in that culture. And the Walkabout is both solitary and public, beginning as it does with years of preparation by family and elders and culminating in a celebratory tribal ritual of transition from adolescence to adulthood. The question I asked was, "What would